Perceptions and practices of academic excellence: Insights from university stakeholders
Kudaibergenova R. Zhidebekkyzy A. Buldybayev T. Utepkaliyeva B. Bilan S.
2025LLC CPC Business Perspectives
Knowledge and Performance Management
2025#9Issue 2246 - 261 pp.
The study analyzes how academic excellence is conceptualized within Kazakhstani universities, focusing on two key internal stakeholder groups: faculty members and administrative staff. While academic excellence has become a global priority, little empirical evidence exists on how it is interpreted in emerging higher education systems. The paper addresses this gap by examining the Kazakhstani case, where government-led excellence initiatives are still in their early stages. A quota-based survey was conducted across 42 universities, producing weighted responses from 832 faculty and 155 administrators. Quantitative data were processed with IBM SPSS Statistics 25, employing descriptive statistics, Welch’s t-test, and two-way ANOVA to compare perceptions between the groups. Despite a broad consensus on the multidimensional nature of academic excellence (positive agreement averaged > 94%), the results reveal consistent differences in their interpretation of core parameters. Of the 32 indicators tested, only four showed no statistically significant difference between faculty and administrators: faculty numbers (p = 0.246), academic reputation and stakeholder recognition (p = 0.701), graduate employability and employer satisfaction (p = 0.106), and student enrollment (p = 0.588). Overall, administrators assigned systematically higher importance to institutional characteristics, enabling components, and barriers across all thematic blocks. Consistent with the conceptual framework integrating institutional and stakeholder perspectives, these patterns indicate that external policy pressures and role-specific responsibilities shape interpretations of excellence. These findings provide a data-driven basis for designing initiatives that couple system-level reforms with participatory governance and co-created metrics, thereby improving the translation of policy into practice.
academic excellence , higher education , Kazakhstan , performance management , stakeholder perceptions , university governance
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Vice-Rector for Research and Commercialization, Almaty Management University, Kazakhstan
School of Management and Tourism, Almaty Management University, Kazakhstan
Almaty Management University, Kazakhstan
National Center for Higher Education Development, Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Kazakhstan
Kautz Gyula Faculty of Business and Economics, Széchenyi István University, Hungary
Vice-Rector for Research and Commercialization
School of Management and Tourism
Almaty Management University
National Center for Higher Education Development
Kautz Gyula Faculty of Business and Economics
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