Authors
Angelika Tsivinskaya1; 1 European University at St Petersburg, Russian Federation Discussion
In this study, we will try to dwell on the conflict between forms of higher education institutions and how they dealt with becoming competitors in the game of being the top university. Would some universities be out of the race from the preliminary phase as they are so different that they always are losers due to initial characteristics? We would like to establish whether performance, niche and initial characteristics set only certain paths for universities where fortunate ones flourish and others face inevitable demise. Our study is about universities viewed from different vantage points. On the macro level for the entire population of universities, we will employ the evolutionary approach which could be called a metatheory. It is an overarching framework that permits the comparison and integration of other social scientific theories. Evolutionary models do not specify the engines driving variation, selection, retention, and struggle and thus we will define what theories in the case of universities can be used for these four core principles. We selected social stratification theory, organizational ecology and neo-institutionalism as possible primarily drivers. In our paper, we argue that some universities are destined to be closed no matter how much improvement they make which is the direct consequence of the performance evaluation measures based on the subset of successful universities driven by unrealistic expectations. 
