Abstract:

Universities worldwide are facing increased international competition during last decades. Russian universities do not stay aside from this process and meet the same challenge in attempt to attract the best students. In such circumstances, the importance of disclosing information about the intellectual capital (IC) of university increases. This information can influence the decision of prospective students and other stakeholders, when they make their choices. The importance of the information disclosure is driven by the service nature of the education, making it hard to assess the quality and the value before the actual consumption. Therefore, prospective students rely on the available information and reviews.

This study explores the extent to which the leading universities in Russia are disclosing information on intellectual capital and which are the most common ways of doing it. Using the content analysis, the web-sites of four leading Russian universities were evaluated. Leading universities were selected based on the rank in QS University Rankings: Eastern and Central Asia (EECA) 2022. The list includes Lomonosov Moscow State University (#1), Saint Petersburg State University (#3), Novosibirsk State University (#8), and Tomsk State University (#9). The indicators that are used by QS rankings partly evaluate some of the elements of intellectual capital and include academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty/student ratio, international faculty, international students, faculty stuff with PhD, web impact, paper per faculty, citations per paper, international research network. Therefore, we can state that the selected universities have at least higher intellectual capital than other Russian universities.

The literature analysis revealed that there is a lack of research of IC in higher education and especially in Russia. The IC of selected universities was assessed based on Intellectual capital disclosure index (ICD index) for business organizations and specialized researches in the area of higher education. The ICD index was adapted to particular need of higher education area in the Russian Federation.

This research also raises methodological issues concerning the specifics of intellectual capital of universities. The research was based on the common definition of IC containing three main groups: human capital, structural capital and relations capital. Most of the research of IC information disclosure aim to determine the influence of information disclosure on the market value of the company. The researches done for universities take similar approach to determine the ICD index. However, as university represent non-profit sector, it is problematic to determine financial market value using classical approach. The university “market value” could be determined better using non-financial approaches, like reputation, brand image, rankings, etc. Therefore, methodologically many of research of universities’ IC information disclosure are limited to either identification of ICD index components, or more prominent research calculate and compare such indexes.

This research evaluates through content analysis how selected leading Russian universities are disclosing the information concerning intellectual capital, which ways are most commonly used and what is the level of IC disclosure in comparison with leading European universities.

Keywords:

Intellectual capital, human capital, relation capital, structural capital, intellectual capital disclosure index, Russian higher education area.