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The determinants of academic salaries in Russia

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Abstract

The system of higher education in Russia, as in many other countries, is in the midst of reforms related to the global trends of globalization and transformation to a knowledge economy. In order to successfully respond to these global challenges, it is necessary to improve the quality of the university sector and rethink the role of professors in enhancing academic productivity. A 20-year period of recession after the collapse of the Soviet Union has led to a diversification of universities and teachers and resulted in both a sharp fall in academic salaries and a decline in the attractiveness of the academic profession. Since the professoriate constitutes the main source of academic productivity, this article assesses the consequences of the decline in the academic sector before the start of major reforms of academic salaries. Using the data from the ‘The Changing Academic Profession’ project (CAP-Russia 2012 subsample), we identified and evaluated the activities of the professoriate that determine the income of university staff. The results show that, in general, the number of publications positively affected academic salaries, but for certain indicators of research activity, the effects are ambiguous. Administrative duties are important for academic salaries, with a positive effect ranging from 15 to 51%. Seniority also has a positive impact on a professor’s salary. The most consistent results in the pre-reform period were obtained for National research universities (NRUs), where academic salaries are determined by research activity (articles in academic journals) and administrative duties. Salaries rise with seniority, which corresponds to the human capital theory (as well as alternative theories). Salaries in NRUs also reflect gender equality. The results of the study can be used to assess the consequences of the recession in the academic sector in Russia and as a baseline for analyzing current reforms in universities.

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Notes

  1. For example, in the 1986/87 academic year, the number of university students in the USSR exceeded 5 million, while the number of students per 10,000 people was 181. In this indicator, the Soviet Union surpassed a number of developed countries, such as France, the UK, and Japan. (Source: The national economy of the USSR for 70 years: Jubilee statistics yearbook / Goskomstat of the USSR. – Moscow. Finance and Statistics. 1987).

  2. It is hard to provide exact estimates of the number of ‘knowledge workers’ who left Russia at that time, but there is a figure of 30,000 people with academic degrees who declared that they found a job outside Russia (Ivakhnyuk 2006). Hence, we may expect even higher real rates of emigration of academic staff caused by the post-Soviet transitions.

  3. For example, in 2000 only 24% of faculty of MSU (Moscow State University, the leading Russian higher education institution) did not have an additional job (Smolentseva 2003).

  4. This is true for Russia, which has moderate labor productivity and high labor costs in the commercial sector. In this case, the development of the academic sector may give certain advantages to meet global challenges and trends.

  5. As stated above, research productivity is not the only element of academic productivity. High-quality teaching also matters; however, research output can be observed more easily than teaching output. Research productivity is easier to evaluate externally, and research plays an important role in university rankings. Hence, proper incentives towards research are of greater importance in the increase of academic productivity in the global arena.

  6. According to the country rankings, in 2012 there were 42,116 indexed citable documents (articles) from Russia with an average of 5.82 citations per document, compared to 537,399 indexed citable documents and 13.1 citations per document in the U.S., or 399,144 indexed citable documents with 7.29 citations per document from China (Source: https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?year=2012). Moreover, the Russian publications had a very small impact: the average citation rate for the Russian publications in 2008–2012 was 0.51, compared to a G20 average of 1.02, and the share of Russian papers among the 10% most cited publications in the same period was 3.8%, compared to a G20 average of 10.2% (Gokhberg, Kuznetsova 2010).

  7. See: https://cinst.hse.ru/en/academic_profession_eng.

  8. This is a sensitive question. That is why we had missing data for the salary variable: 99 respondents out of 1623 (6% of the sample) refused to answer this question. 450 respondents stated that they receive a zero salary from this institution and they also were thus also excluded from further analysis. However, the number of professors who responded to the salary question still exceeds the effective sample size of 800 people required by CAP standards (Yudkevich et al. 2013). For all other the variables the response rate was very high.

  9. The effect for members of faculty who have a single job is lower (15–16%), but still significant. This can be explained by the fact that professors, who have higher returns on academic duties, are more experienced and therefore more likely to be recruited by other employers in academic, public or private sectors.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Ulrich Teichler and William Cummings for granting me access to the Changing Academic Profession database. I am also grateful to the participants of the 4th International Conference on Academic Profession in Knowledge Society (Seoul, 2016) and to my colleagues from Center for Institutional Studies Anna Panova and Maria Yudkevich for their valuable comments on the earlier version of the paper.

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  1. Research Fellow, International Laboratory for Institutional Analysis of Economic Reforms, Center for Institutional Studies, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Myasnitskaya 20, Moscow, 101000, Russia

    Ilya Prakhov

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Correspondence to Ilya Prakhov.

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The reported study was funded by RFBR according to the research project No 18-310-00115.

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Prakhov, I. The determinants of academic salaries in Russia. High Educ 77, 777–797 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-018-0301-y

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