Internationalization of Ural Federal University: Overview of Strategic Plans and

management, the mergers of academic units were an integral part of this model and allowed UrFU to consolidate financial, teaching and other resources within the academic units.

4.4 Internationalization of Ural Federal University: Overview of Strategic Plans and

In the new era of UrFU, after the merger of two key regional universities, internationalization was understood as “attracting international students, teachers and researchers” (Ural Federal University, 2009, p. 6). The program also emphasized the

importance of master and PhD programs in English (Ural Federal University, 2009, p. 27). In 2012, UrFU was selected as a participant of Project 5-100 and, as a result, developed a road map for achieving its goals – the Competitiveness Enhancement Program (Ural Federal University, 2013b).

The development of the strategic document was based on benchmarks from Europe and Asia: Aalto University (Finland), Sungkyunkwan University (South Korea), Yonsei University (South Korea), City University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong), Tsing Hua

University (China). The Competitiveness Enhancement Program included four stages: 2013-2014, 2015-2016, 2017 and 2018-2020. An updated version of the document was issued prior to the beginning of each stage. The value of achieving certain positions in international rankings, which was the initial driver of Project 5-100, decreased significantly when the latest version of the document was issued. Entrance into the top positions of world rankings was not indicated as a strategic goal in the subsequent edition of the Competitiveness

Enhancement Program (2018, private communication), while it had been named among their key goals in 2013.

The system of key actions according to UrFU’s road map (Ural Federal University, 2013b) are displayed in Appendix F and are divided into six directions: educational

programs, campus, personnel development, open university and e-learning, research and innovations, service and management. As the overview of key actions in Appendix F

illustrates, the listed actions combine close cooperation with regional enterprises and research institutes with bringing international practices to the university dimensions (research, study programs and academic mobility, management processes) and expanding UrFU’s positioning

abroad. This approach corresponds to the university mission and vision (provided in section 4.2) which considers an increase in international competitiveness as a necessary component for the advanced development of the regional economy and, thus, combines both further intensification of close relationships with the region and the development of the international dimension.

After the beginning of Project 5-100, UrFU realized that it should choose one key target among three listed rankings in order to concentrate its resources and achieve the best possible results, at least, in one ranking. Consequently, UrFU chose QS ranking as its primary target, followed by THE ranking. This was reflected in the indicators and tasks of UrFU Competitiveness Enhancement Program.

In order to measure its progress towards the key actions, UrFU developed a list of 18 key performance indicators (Ural Federal University, 2013b, p.59) among which were positions in the QS and THE rankings of world universities and their subject rankings. The list of KPIs included five indicators related to QS, two indicators linked to the THE ranking tables and no indicators for ARWU ranking. In addition, the list of indicators contained several measurements of research output, and among them, numbers of publications indexed in Web of Science and Scopus databases and their citations. Finally, the list included the number of international students and professors, as well as number of graduate and postgraduate programs in foreign languages. The full list of indicators can be found in Appendix H.

Furthermore, the document emphasized (Ural Federal University, 2013b, p.3) that the five most important indicators were the average citations per faculty for five years, number of international faculty members, number of international students, income from Research and Advanced Development per faculty and number of publications with international co-authors.

Therefore, four out of five priority indicators, as of 2013, belonged to the international dimension, except for research income which mostly came from national sources of funding.

In addition to the indicators, the Competitiveness Enhancement Program (Ural Federal University, 2013b) also reflected the impact of the QS methodology, which was strongly based on academic and employer reputation. Indeed, the first part of the document describes this very impact. After getting acquainted with the indicators listed above, the reader then learns, in the benchmarking section of the document (Ural Federal University, 2013b, p.6), that UrFU studied the experience of Aalto University, since this institution managed to increase its academic and employer reputation via strong cooperation with

international researchers. Similarly, UrFU aimed to develop international recruiting of faculty members as well as intensifying cooperation with international corporations. The importance of employer reputation is mentioned in the section on corporate relations (p.18) where UrFU wished to intensify the cooperation with employers, achieve a growing number of patents in Russia and abroad, increase commercialization of technological prototypes and its presence on consulting, engineering, communication markets. All this was aimed at strengthening UrFU’s employer reputation.

As regards the analysis of weaknesses (pp.19-20), the Program shows that UrFU realized that there was a lack of competitive international degree programs, a low level of English proficiency among its faculty members and low numbers of publications in international journals prior to Project 5-100. These weaknesses needed to be overcome in order to develop UrFU’s academic reputation.

Secondly, we find the impact of QS methodology in the Action Plan of the document.

This presents a breakdown of the key actions, which can be found in Appendix F, and includes the following action dedicated to the informational and branding policy (Ural Federal University, 2013b, p.44): “Positioning and promotion of the university in target

markets”. This action included two tasks, among others (pp. 44-45), which were directly influenced by the requirements of QS ranking since the position in its ranking table of world universities was indicated as the first KPI for these tasks: “Positioning and promotion of the university in the market of the Russian Federation and neighboring countries”, which referred to the CIS countries, and “Increasing the publicity and academic reputation of Ural Federal University in the far-abroad countries”. The mechanisms of these tasks included publications and other forms of promotion in the media, participation in international conferences and exhibitions, management of their own events, partnership with student recruitment agencies and Russian agencies abroad and other activities. The Action Plan of Competitiveness Enhancement Program also included several tasks on developing cooperation with corporate partners.

In conclusion, this section showed that, despite UrFU not elaborating a specific strategy of internationalization, the institution was aware of the importance of the

international dimension since the very merger of its predecessors in 2009 and the integrated development of internationalization in its strategic documents from that time onwards.

However, the analysis of its positioning in the world, weaknesses in terms of international dimension, and a detailed road map for the development of various aspects of

internationalization were elaborated only after the beginning of Project 5-100. The section also illustrated that after launch of 5-100, UrFU chose positions in QS ranking tables as its main target among the three leading world university rankings, and elaborated its key

strategic document – Competitive Enhancement Program, taking into account the QS ranking methodology.