Results of the Post-Soviet Transformation of Higher Education

Abstract

The article uses the socio-cultural methodology and comparative studies to examine the results of the transformation of national higher school systems in the former USSR on the eve of the post-Soviet thirtieth anniversary. It is established that over the past decades of the post–Soviet transformation, the higher school of 15 States of the former USSR has gone through two main stages: the first was primarily a stage of structural changes, and the second was integration into the European higher education space. A classification of the realities of organizational orientation of higher education systems is proposed, dividing them into westernized (the Baltic countries, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan), systems with specific educational balances (Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia), and outsider countries (Turkmenistan, Tajikistan). It is shown that during this period unique cases of transformation of national higher schools emerged. They evolved from divergence in the direction of convergence through E-education and global unification. The purpose of the study was to show that in the near future post-Soviet structures of higher education will have to respond primarily to universal post-industrial challenges based on the identification of stages of higher education evolution.