Altai State University has reached the level of the Russian leading universities in 2015

In 2015 ASU with 34 other Russian universities has taken part in the second stage of the open competition organized by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, which is held among leading universities of Russia for government support in order to increase their competitiveness among world scientific and educational centers.
The first stage of the competition was conducted in 2013; 15 universities were chosen to become the participants of “Project 5-100”. In October 2015 six more higher education institutions, which managed to defend their competitive growth programs at the meeting of the Council on Competitiveness Enhancement of Leading Russian Universities among Global Research and Education Centers chaired by Minister of Education and Science of Russia Dmitriy Livanov, were added to the project.

The participants were estimated based on the quality of the developed programs, as well as the competition documents taking into account universities’ current potential: the number of government-subsidized students, their Unified State Exam results, the percentage of postgraduate students, the volume of costs for scientific research and developments per one lecturer, the number of publications in journals listed in Web of Science and Scopus per 100 lecturers, the percentage of international students and lecturers.

“For ASU the relevance of getting the government support primarily consisted in the fact that ASU ran out of government financing in 2014, while its growth rate could not be decreased. More than that, ASU lacked only 0.3% of the postgraduate students’ percentage to go forward to the second stage of the competition,” states head of the ASU Department of Strategy, Analysis and Monitoring Dmitriy Khvalynskiy. “At the same time, the university’s rates analysis shows that ASU had sufficient potential for joining the list of winner-universities. In particular, ASU took 3-5 places by all rates, except postgraduate students percentage (6 out of 7 rates). The results of Russian universities’ effectiveness monitoring, which are published by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation on open access, make carrying-out of such analysis possible.”

In 2015 ASU managed to increase its pace of development in view of mentioned priority directions: the percentage of international students increased 1.5 times and reached almost 8%, the percentage of international lecturers involved in educational and scientific activities tripled, the volume of research and engineering works increased 1.2 times, publication activity of the teaching staff rose in 1,5 times as compared to 2014.

Eventually, when Minister of Education and Science of Russia Dmitriy Livanov signed the order to conduct the competitive selection for establishing the overarching universities on the base of educational institutions on 16 October 2015, ASU 2015 rates have already exceeded 4 out of 7 performance targets of Russian overarching university that were supposed to be reached by 2020.

It remains to be added, that universities’ growth rates estimations allow to predict that ASU will be able to reach 6 out of 7 performance targets by 2020 independently (without government support).