Efficiency of Universities Performance: From Monitoring and Ranking to Intellectual Capital Evaluation

Several kinds of stakeholders are interested in the results of universities evaluation, including the government, applicants, employers, business and academics. The existing evaluation tools, such as international and national ranking, as well as monitoring of the efficiency of higher education institutions (HEIs) conducted by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, do not take into account the specifics of universities, are not consistent with the goals and tasks of the higher education system and have a number of other significant shortcomings. The use of ranking and monitoring for decision-making in most cases leads to distortions. As a result, the question of improving the existing tools and searching for new approaches to assessing the activities of HEIs is growing in popularity. Measuring the value of intellectual capital of universities may be one of such approaches. The paper analyses the methodological basis for the assessment of universities, determines the need for a clear formulation of the object and the subject of the evaluation, as well as the objectives of the assessment through the prism of the customer’s aims, identification of the valuator and the evaluation tools used. It reveals the peculiarities and disadvantages of the assessment of universities’ activity through rankings and monitoring of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. The article proves the idea of using the value of HEIs’ intellectual capital as one of their performance indicators.