Article
Demographic Trends and the Accessibility of Higher Education in Russia
Fertility, mortality and migration are constantly changing the population dynamics in Russia. Various historical events (economic crises, the collapse of the USSR, etc.) had a huge impact on the age and sex pyramid of the population. The consequences of the demographic crisis also influenced the number of potential university enrollments. An analysis of demographic trends in the Russian higher education (HE) system made it possible to identify several patterns.
Bridging the gap between higher education research and policy making was always a challenge, but the recent calls for more evidence-based policies have opened a window of unprecedented opportunity for researchers to bring more contributions to shaping the future of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Encouraged by the success of the 2011 first edition, Romania and Armenia have organised a 2nd edition of the Future of Higher Education – Bologna Process Researchers’ Conference (FOHE-BPRC) in November 2014, with the support of the Italian Presidency of the European Union and as part of the official EHEA agenda. Reuniting over 170 researchers from more than 30 countries, the event was a forum to debate the trends and challenges faced by higher education today and look at the future of European cooperation in higher education. The research volumes offer unique insights regarding the state of affairs of European higher education and research, as well as forward-looking policy proposals. More than 50 articles focus on essential themes in higher education: Internationalization of higher education; Financing and governance; Excellence and the diversification of missions; Teaching, learning and student engagement; Equity and the social dimension of higher education; Education, research and innovation; Quality assurance, The impacts of the Bologna Process on the EHEA and beyond and Evidence-based policies in higher education.
The author shows that demographic transition is an organic part of civilization developments. Such phenomen as death rate and birth rate, changes in character of migration are connected with stages of development of a civilization.
Un nou factor a fost adus constant în prim-plan în cadrul analizei şi proiectării politicii de învăţământ superior. Acest factor se referă la perspectivele demografice, deoarece acestea includ probleme legate de demografia în sine, cât şi la alte subiecte cu o referinţă mai largă, cum ar fi fluxurile de migraţie şi ciclurile de viaţă ale persoanelor, în această perioadă de modernitate. Sunt instituţiile de învăţământ superior din Europa pregătite în mod adecvat pentru a reacţiona la schimbările demografice fără precedent? Cum pot ele răspunde cel mai bine la astfel de provocări, în contextul evoluţiilor regionale, cum ar fi Procesul de la Bologna? Care sunt bunele practici de urmat? Publicat în cadrul seriei “Învăţământ Superior pentru o societate a cunoaşterii” a UNESCO-CEPES, acest volum oferă câteva reflecţii şi analize, şi ridică o serie de preocupări legate de astfel de anchete de actualitate. Volumul beneficiază de contribuţiile unei echipe multidisciplinare internaţionale de experţi şi prezintă studii de caz naţionale din ţări ca Estonia, Germania, Polonia, România, Suedia, Federaţia Rusă, Turcia şi Marea Britanie, precum şi studii tematice referitoare la migraţie şi la ciclurile de viaţă. Cea mai mare parte a datelor prezentate în lucrare sunt foarte recente, şi analiza ar putea avea impact asupra politicii de învăţământ superior. Acest volum se adresează tuturor celor interesaţi şi preocupaţi despre schimbările demografice actuale din Europa şi despre impactul acestora asupra învăţământului superior.
The paper discusses the development of the organizational practices in a Russian university under the influence of the environment. In the latter, the key factors are legislation and regulations of the Ministry of education and science. This influence is ambiguous and varies in different aspects, so to understand combined effect one needs detailed analysis using purposebuilt tools. The paper introduces such tool based on ideas of business model canvas by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur and organizational design theory by Henry Mintzberg. This instrument makes it possible to conduct a system analysis of the organizational design of the university, the integrity of this design and its fit to the environmental conditions. In particular, this analysis shows, how the system of restrictions and stimuli, created by the Ministry of education and science leads to the degradation of education quality in a classic university
The main reason the so-called "crisis of education" covers not only the rap-id changes in the system of knowledge and technology, but also the changes in the labor market, the prevalence of atypical employment. As a result, the univer-sity, by definition, can not train a specialist, fully satisfying the requirements of the employer. For example, the direction of "Advertising and public relations" proposes measures to resolve the existing contradictions.
The life course is becoming more flexible and more amenable to personal adjustment for contemporary youth. The process and timing of entering adulthood is expanding due to longer education and the search for oneself. Young people in contemporary Russia do not rush to acquire social statuses that were once so desirable in Soviet times, i.e. that of a parent, employee, and family person. Today, prestige is based on acquiring a good education and career, processes on which they are betting (Blum et al., 2009: 158–159).
Young people also have very specific demands for quality: quality of life, quality of intimate relations, and quality of parenting. All of this has motivated young people to ceaselessly look for an appropriate job, home, partner, and to invest in their children, preferring quality to quantity.
Efficient family-planning tools have separated marital, reproductive, and sexual behavior, transforming these into three different spheres of self-fulfillment. All of these stages, now stretched out through time, reflect individual needs and perspectives. The increasing dispersal of timing of marital relations and childbearing reveals that young people are postponing important demographic events further and further.
Russians have only recently acquired the opportunity to efficiently manage the most prolific period of their lives — youth. They attempt to start planning their lives as early as possible and to construct it sequentially in a personally tailored way.
In this paper, we discuss the methods of endowment management existing in the world and their applicability to the Russian university system. The endowment spending research focuses on the following issues: reinvesting endowment income; identifying the size of expendable endowment income; using the endowment body, not onlyincome; choosing endowment spending policy, rule and rate endowments, etc. We provide an overview of endowment fund financial indicators and endowment spending allocationin Russia. Based on the example of the HSE Endowment Fund, we analyze the use of endowment spending rulesand model of financial indicators for 2008–2014. The University’s Endowment Fund endowment spending policies implement the preservation principle, which may be reasonable in a stable economy. However, the viability of the principle is questionable in the crisis, the more so since the endowment is mostly in rubles. Using net asset valuation methods, the HSE Endowment Fund could provide equity betweengenerations with annual distribution of income in favor of the next and current generations.
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.
The article is devoted to the study of the authoritarianism prevalent in the mass consciousness of Russians. The article describes a new approach to the consideration of the authoritarian syndrome as the effects of the cultural trauma as a result of political and socio-cultural transformation of society. The article shows the dynamics of the symptoms of the authoritarianism, which appear in the mass consciousness of Russians from 1993 to 2011. This paper proposes a package of measures aimed at reducing the level of the authoritarianism in Russian society.
This work looks at a model of spatial election competition with two candidates who can spend effort in order to increase their popularity through advertisement. It is shown that under certain condition the political programs of the candidates will be different. The work derives the comparative statics of equilibrium policy platform and campaign spending with respect the distribution of voter policy preferences and the proportionality of the electoral system. In particular, it is whown that the equilibrium does not exist if the policy preferences are distributed over too narrow an interval.
The article examines "regulatory requirements" as a subject of state control over business in Russia. The author deliberately does not use the term "the rule of law". The article states that a set of requirements for business is wider than the legislative regulation.
First, the article analyzes the regulatory nature of the requirements, especially in the technical field. The requirements are considered in relation to the rule of law. The article explores approaches to the definition of regulatory requirements in Russian legal science. The author analyzes legislation definitions for a set of requirements for business. The author concludes that regulatory requirements are not always identical to the rule of law. Regulatory requirements are a set of obligatory requirements for entrepreneurs’ economic activity. Validation failure leads to negative consequences.
Second, the article analyzes the problems of the regulatory requirements in practice. Lack of information about the requirements, their irrelevance and inconsistency are problems of the regulatory requirements in Russia.
Many requirements regulating economic activity are not compatible with the current development level of science and technology. The problems are analyzed on the basis of the Russian judicial practice and annual monitoring reports by Higher School of Economics.
Finally, the author provides an approach to the possible solution of the regulatory requirements’ problem. The author proposes to create a nationwide Internet portal about regulatory requirements. The portal should contain full information about all regulatory requirements. The author recommends extending moratorium on the use of the requirements adopted by the bodies and organizations of the former USSR government.