Some of the larger Federal Universities that participated at the QS APPLE conference in Seoul South Korea had something very distinctive about them. All of them were formed out of mergers of smaller Universities that took place in the past 3 years in Russia.

These are not edge cases in Russia. During my conversations with the Directors, Rectors, and faculty members from these Universities, I found out that Russia (Moscow, as they would mention it) has been proactively trying to merge Universities and in the process the Government is trying to create really large institutions with strengths in multiple disciplines.

Funding has been a serious problem with the Russian Universities, and most of them agreed that they have’t been receiving a lot of International students interested in studying at their Universities.

With more local dependence for generating revenues for their programs and research, the Government seems to have initiated the merging process. The stakeholders feel that this allowed for synergies that would help these new federal Universities to be capable to creating disruption in the domain.

These new mergers have also brought in their own set of challenges. I asked the members of these Universities to be candid about their thoughts on advantages and challenges. This is how they responded:

Advantages:

– funding was always a concern, and the competition amongst smaller institutions with similar research and programs wasn’t really helping. Internationalization process needed money, which wasn’t available. The merger process has ensured that there is a steady funding from the Russian Government

– scale of operations, number of programs, new programs in English, recruitment of additional faculty who would teach in English, etc have improved. All these weren’t strategically important prior to the mergers, but now these are critical success factors and a part of the job description for Directors of various programs

– Quality of work, competition, and overall attitude towards internationalization has improved, since the new mergers have brought in more and diverse ideas, best of available talent together on the discussion table, and now the benchmarking is against the best in the world

Challenges:

– Senior people lost their jobs, and such things have brought in a sense of insecurity that wasn’t seen before. This has increased stress levels amongst the mid-level academicians as well as the leaders in specific programs

– Processes have increased. The same decisions that were being made within 2 levels of discussions now have to go through 4-5 levels. Also, arguing with bureaucrats for things that are academic or even administrative in nature is at times futile. Operational efficiency may therefore be suffering

– Attitudes are yet to be merged actually. People from different institutions/universities that got merged have come with a lot of baggage and the liberal ones are feeling the heat in idea generation and conversations.

Is something like this needed in India? Will this solve our higher education problems? What do you think?