The Market of University Endowments in Russia:Development Trends and Opportunities

The roundtable discussion addressed the development of endowment funding at Russia’s universities as a factor of competitiveness in the global education and science market. These universities, however, usually have impressive endowment funds that allow them to attract additional funding and to ensure self-sufficiency and independence from the external environment. The analysis shows that this is a long way from developing a mature endowment model in Russia. For the moment, even the universities with the largest endowment funds fail to take top slots in the world university rankings. This puts the issue of establishing and building-up of universities endowments very high on the agenda in Russia. To do this, it is necessary to solve a variety of problems including the absence of a single economic entity in the University-Endowment couple, unpreparedness of the Russian Science Foundation to finance the endowment funds of national universities, immaturity of the charity infrastructure and more. To avoid all these headwinds we need to introduce adjustments to the appropriate regulating documents, to revise the university performance evaluation procedure with due account for endowment funds, to develop a system for the competitive allocation of funds between endowments and to redefine the government’s priorities concerning the Russian universities competing for a position in world’s top-100 university rankings. All the debated issues require further examination and evaluation, but nevertheless they have significant capacity for raising efficiency of the market regulation system in the Russia’s Higher Education.