Article
Как деградируют университеты? к постановке проблемы
The paper analyses possible reasons for degradation of a variety of public universities in Russia. On the basis of indepth interviews with representatives of failing universities singled out according to objective data, external and internal factors for their degradation are revealed.
Higher Education has become a central institution of society, building individual knowledge, skills, agency, and relational social networks at unprecedented depth and scale. Within a generation there has been an extraordinary global expansion of Higher Education, in every region in all but the poorest countries, outstripping economic growth and deriving primarily from familial aspirations for betterment. By focusing on the systems and countries that have already achieved near universal participation, High Participation Systems of Higher Education explores this remarkable transformation. The world enrolment ratio, now rising by 10 per cent every decade, is approaching 40 per cent, mostly in degree-granting institutions, including three quarters of young people in North America and Europe. Higher Education systems in the one in three countries that enrol more than 50 per cent are here classified as 'high participation systems'. Part I of the book measures, maps, and explains the growth of participation, and the implications for society and Higher Education itself. Drawing on a wide range of literature and data, the chapters theorize the changes in governance, institutional diversity, and stratification in Higher Education systems, and the subsequent effects in educational and social equity. The theoretical propositions regarding high-participation Higher Education developed in these chapters are then tested in the country case studies in Part II, presenting a comprehensive enquiry into the nature of the emerging 'high participation society'.
The chapter focuses on the ultimate question of the project: what will change in a society when a majority of the age group will have higher education. Seeking for approaches to understand the future role of higher education in the HPS societies the chapter reviews theories and concepts developed in two disciplinary traditions: social sciences (structural functionalism, neoinstitutionalism, conflict theories, cultural reproduction theories as well as some higher education specific approaches) and educational philosophy (Bildung theories, growth theory among others). Those two strands of scholarship respectively highlight two key dimensions in the relationship between higher education and society: (a) the social and occupational structure and (b) socialization as human/personal development, self-formation. The chapter addresses the potential changes in HPS societies along those lines. It concludes that a Bildung idea of the duality of human nature as both being determined by the world and being self-determining largely corresponds two above disciplinary approaches and their traditional focus and opens up an intellectual space for further cross-disciplinary, multi-dimensional research on the role of higher education for individuals and society.
This article is designed to draw attention to such phenomenon as academic diversity of students within universities and specify a research agenda for studying this phenomenon and its relationship with university management. A review of existing literature and statistics on the example of Russia allows for a) identifying the range of possible reasons for the growth of academic diversity in higher education institutions and b) offering basic prerequisites for defining its level. For the first time the article analyses the academic diversity as a contextual variable and the organizational characteristic of higher education institutions, and justifies its significance for university governance and management. Also, the authors provide a range of theoretical framework through which university governance can be analysed in the context of high academic diversity. The continuation of this work will be a more detailed study of practices at such universities. The results of this work can be used to expand the current research agenda in the field of higher education, as well as to analyse and plan the activities of specific universities.
Institutions affect investment decisions, including investments in human capital. Hence institutions are relevant for the allocation of talent. Good market-supporting institutions attract talent to productive value-creating activities, whereas poor ones raise the appeal of rent-seeking. We propose a theoretical model that predicts that more talented individuals are particularly sensitive in their career choices to the quality of institutions, and test these predictions on a sample of around 95 countries of the world. We find a strong positive association between the quality of institutions and graduation of college and university students in science, and an even stronger negative correlation with graduation in law. Our findings are robust to various specifications of empirical models, including smaller samples of former colonies and transition countries. The quality of human capital makes the distinction between educational choices under strong and weak institutions particularly sharp. We show that the allocation of talent is an important link between institutions and growth.