The domestic high school professional education system transformation: constraining factors and the assessment ambiguity

Abstract

The social transformations that took place under the influence of globalization and neoliberalization at the turn of the 20th – 21st centuries led to the need for deep structural and functional changes in the system of domestic higher professional education. Despite the fact that over the past twenty years in domestic practice a lot of directive documents have been developed and a number of serious management decisions have been adopted that have a direct impact on the development of the Russian education system at all levels, the domestic higher school in many respects cannot reach a level that makes it possible to make a serious competition to the participants of the world scientific and educational space. A retrospective analysis of the main conceptual documents that determine the development of the domestic education system, carried out in the work, showed that reforms of the domestic higher education system often do not reach their logical conclusion, since they are predominantly declarative in nature, far from always supported by a legislative framework, which leads to inconsistency in practical actions on their implementation. The article reveals that the incompleteness of the reforms is largely due to the existing gaps in cooperation between the institutions of education, science and industrial production, which all conceptually significant documents declare, but in practice, close mutually beneficial cooperation between these actors does not sufficiently manifest itself. The author indicates that such interaction can be carried out through the development of university systems, which, being integrated into the economy of the regions and acting as a driver of innovative development, can contribute to increasing the competitiveness of Russian universities in the international scientific and educational space.