Investigating the Dependence of University Efficiency on its Scale in Russia

The educational system is one of the most important social institutions in modern society, which is hard to overestimate, because it not only allows to transfer the knowledge accumulated by mankind, but also creates new and in general impacts on the face of a whole new generations. From the management perspective, the question of studying the efficiency of a university consists, first of all, in finding the sources of inefficiency, if there are any, as well as shaping ways to overcome it. As part of this work, the question of whether and, if so, how and to what extend the scale of a university affects its efficiency, is being investigated. A retrospective review of existing scientific literature on the impact of scale on university performance has revealed the existing ambiguity of the issue. The scale up of a university leads to a quantitative increase in scientific work produced, which, in turn, enhances the reputation of the university and attracts more talented professors and students. However, according to the theory of microeconomics and economy of scale, from a certain point the effect of scale may be negative, and, consequently, financing - ineffective. At present, there is no single answer to the question of whether the university needs growth in order to perform at a more optimal and high-quality level. The identified gap in the study of this issue showed the relevance of the research. Thus, the main purpose of this research was an investigation the influence of the scale of the university on its efficiency, as well as a description of this effect if it is present. Higher education is a complex sphere of society, so that it has at least three crucial stakeholders, among which: students, universities themselves and government. In order to consider interests of each of the parties, the term efficiency implies all the following components: quality, productivity, and effectiveness of the educational process. Efficiency is an indicator of how successfully, using the available tools and methods, best possible performance combined with adding value to a student’s knowledge, subject to limited resources. Therefore, the question of evaluating the efficiency is a multidimensional issue for study and universities have a lot of parameters to evaluate their performance. For the most objective and high-quality assessment of the multicriteria education system, the Data Envelopment Analysis method was chosen. A retrospective analysis made it possible to determine that this method has previously been widely used by scientists from different countries over the past decades to evaluate the efficiency of universities. To test the hypothesis about the influence of the university’s scale on its efficiency, the primary data of Monitoring the national educational system in Russia, according to 2017, were used, since at the time of the study it was the most relevant dataset. As a result of the research, it was determined that the scale of the university as a whole does not influence on its efficiency. Nevertheless, some dependence of the efficiency and scale of the university can be traced in the long-term perspective. In addition, it was determined that universities of different scales are characterized by inefficiency in certain areas. In the case of small universities, the crucial component to focus on is infrastructure. As for medium-sized universities, there is an inefficiency in human resources and recruitment policy. Large universities in general are less likely to find themselves not on the efficiency frontier, however, for them, there are still several benchmarking DMUs from the given sample in Russia.