Measurements of inequalities in access to higher education: Case of the Russian Federation

This paper focuses on the systematic investigation of the influence of the quasi-experimental projects on possible changes in inequality in access to higher education in Russia. While intuition points toward a positive effect of introduction of the standardized tests and educational vouchers on the decrease in inequality in access to higher education and more effective, efficient, and fairer distribution of the state funds in higher education, empirical evidence on this issue has yet to be found. This paper presents evaluation techniques for the experiments including introduction of the distribution index (DI) to measure income and education inequalities. The DI, the weighted DI, and the share weighted DI allow capturing changes in inequalities in income distribution, concentration of wealth, or access to higher education more precisely than does the Gini coefficient.