Institutional mechanisms of social governance of higher education: a comparison of China and Russia

Abstract

Social governance of higher education in China and Russia rests on divergent institutional configurations, while the declared aims of these systems – massification, the equalization of access, the selective concentration of resources and the retention of quality control – largely coincide. This raises the question of how comparable the governance circuits are under a differing institutional architecture. The aim of the study is to identify and compare the institutional mechanisms of social governance of higher education in the two countries and to determine to what extent the similarity of quantitative outcomes is secured by a difference of regulatory instruments. Comparative-institutional analysis, the structural-functional approach and a secondary analysis of official statistics of the ministries of education and the national statistical services for 2020-2025 are applied. The comparison is carried out along the normative-legal, the resource-and-programme, the stratification-and-selection circuits and the circuit of quality control. With a gross enrolment ratio in tertiary education in China of about 60.8% and a student body of 48.46 million, on the one hand, and a contingent of over 4.3 million in Russia, on the other, resource concentration is implemented through a similar programme instrument with a different density of network coverage. The similarity of the observed parameters is attained because the Russian circuit, decentralized in form, and the Chinese circuit, party-and-state in form, perform functionally close tasks of selection and stratification; the difference in governance forms does not remove the coincidence of the social functions of higher education as a mechanism for distributing statuses within formally widened access.