June 6th, 2018

The RAEX Rating Agency presented its the 7th annual ranking of the Russian results on the Global Competitiveness Forum in Moscow. The RAEX ranking is based on 45 indicators and survey results among 30,000 respondents: academics, students, alumni, and employers.

The top three universities: Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and National Research Nuclear University MEPhI (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute), continue to maintain their positions for the fourth year in a row’, notes Alexey Khodyrev, Executive Director of University Rankings at the RAEX Rating Agency.

‘The top ten universities from the 2017 ranking still remain in the top ten, but the order of their positions has changed.’ The National Research University Higher School of Economics claimed its position in the ranking by getting ahead of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and coming in fifth. This dynamics can be attributed to significant increase in research indicators of the Higher School of Economics and the strong performance of its students at prestigious international contests. The latter metric has been introduced to the RAEX Ranking for the first time in 2018.

According to the RAEX Ranking, 50 out of top 100 Russian universities are located in four regions: Moscow, Saint Petersburg, the Tomsk Oblast, and the Moscow Oblast. The fact that the strongest universities are concentrated in a limited number of the federal subjects inhibits the development of the regional economies.

A number of historically specialized universities are shifting towards interdisciplinary approach (many Russian universities had been created by the industrial model, i.e. each university was designed with one particular industrial branch in mind, which is a legacy from the Soviet times). The RAEX University Ranking showed that the specialized universities which were able to move beyond their usual domains had an advantage. Specializing in one subject area has a number of perils and contradicts the interdisciplinary approach which is essential for both scientific study and the alumni's success at the job market.

Medical schools show the best performance among the socially important universities: 13 medical schools have been included in the top 100 universities of the ranking. It should be noted that pedagogical universities are only represented by three participants, and there are two agricultural universities in the ranking. According to the RAEX agency, this situation poses a threat for human capital asset development on a national scale.

Top 20 in the RAEX University Ranking 2018

Source: RAEX (RAEX Analytics)