Conceptual foundations for opportunistic behavior of university teachers

Abstract

The effective system of secondary and higher education is becoming an essential element ensuring competitiveness of the national economy. At the same time, this system cannot be based only on investments in education. If there are no institutional investments in education, government investments, no matter how large they are, will not help achieve the desired results. Private companies do no invest in education at all. One of the most important conditions for effective educational services market is full-fledged competition in the labor market. Companies as buyers of the final product (specialist) should compete with each other. This is a prerequisite for the development of competition between providers of educational services – Institutes and Universities. Competition between institutions will increase the level of qualification of specialists (quality growth) and correspondence between the professional structure of specialists and the structure of jobs in the labor market. This will happen if the sellers copy the most successful patterns of behavior of those the sellers who have achieved commercial success in the market of educational services. Finally, there will be competition between applicants for the purchase of educational services, which will effectively adjust the policies of sellers – Institutes and Universities. When training specialists, Russian universities focus on requests coming from the institutions (government and quasi-government structures) having high budget revenues rather than on the market needs. This refers to numerous state and quasi-state structures. These customers can significantly reduce efficiency of the higher education system.