ABSTRACT
Imagine a situation where sportsmen of the same country never meet each other at domestic championships – only at World Championships or the Olympic Games. They know little about each other’s performance, while their trainers never learn from each other on professional techniques and advances in training. Everyone would agree that such a situation is improbable and one can hardly imagine that this country could do well in international leagues without national competitions and domestic training, as well as without some cooperation at the national level. However, the situation with Russian universities is almost as just described and it does not prevent many national policy-makers from having expectations about impressive and quick victories in the international academic arena. In this chapter we discuss how institutional features in the Russian higher education system and academic market define current positions in the global university charts and affect recent efforts both of the government and leading Russian universities to improve positions in global university rankings.
