The article conceptually analyzes the causes of the long-time conflict of state management with scientific and educational community and its organizations, as well as the reasons for their weak interaction with producers, employers, and taxpayers. The author sees these reasons in cognitive biases of knowledge extraction, creation, dissemination and practical use market participants’ expectations, including those of the universities. These distortions are ascertained and considered in the article from the standpoint of the result of any activity being socially significant only if it is equally or at least comparably acceptable for both its authors and those who use this result to achieve their goals. Within this consideration, there have been used modern ideas on the limited rationality of thinking when making decisions, as well as various data from the history of science concerning the evolution of its social role. The article contains a classification of segments (types) of scientific and educational activities. This classification might be of importance not only for a specialist in science and education, but also for their consumers, which makes these results socially meaningful. The classification given can serve as a methodological basis for eliminating distortions and harmonizing relations among the state, business, universities, scientific and educational communities, and taxpayers. This also implies a clear declaration of the expectations and obligations of all these parties, which should be enshrined in the legislative and regulatory framework of science and education management. This implies upgrading researchers, teaching staff and managers’ qualifications, especially in the sphere of overcoming communicative barriers.

The article is a study of the current and prospective markets for supplementary vocational education in Russia, including the key areas of technological development and the place of universities at these markets. The market of supplementary vocational education is highly competitive, gradually developing thanks to the growth in the number of providers of educational programmes and courses, as well as due to the emergence of new educational formats (online courses, distance education). In the nearest future, the main competition at the market of extra-budgetary supplementary vocational education will be among the universities for the funds of companies (organizations) that improve the skills of their employees in the field of promising technological areas. The article in this regard aims at assessing the scale of the supplementary vocational education market, in particular its financial aspect, the place of universities in it, as well as the identification of promising directions and forms of the supplementary vocational education development. The study is based on official statistics, monitoring, and sample surveys. The situation that has developed in the sphere of supplementary vocational education is considered at the macro- and micro-levels. First, there have been identified trends at the Russian supplementary vocational education market, including financial parameters, the typology of students, the relative popularity of various types of supplementary vocational education, and the place of universities as supplementary vocational education providers. At the micro-level, the scale and parameters of demand at the supplementary vocational education market for promising technological areas are analyzed. The study showed that nowadays the supply from Russia universities exceeds the demand, although the market for extra-budgetary supplementary vocational education is quite large, five times larger than the budgetary supplementary vocational education. An assessment of the market segment specializing in promising, including cross-cutting digital technologies, showed that this market is quite narrow compared to the total extra-budgetary supplementary vocational education, and there dominate a limited number of universities to be competed with by leading companies developing corporate supplementary vocational education (especially in data science). Prospects for the development of this market are associated not only with new appearing forms of distance education, but also with various types of cooperative and network supplementary vocational education programmes of cooperative university-and-company development and implementation. At the same time, new state programmes and national projects (such as «The Digital Economy of the Russian Federation», «New Opportunities for Everyone», the national project «Science», and Competence Centres of the National Technology Initiative) can provide an additional impetus to the development of supplementary vocational education. The limitations of the study are related to the conventions and assumptions in the calculations connected with lacking detailed information on the financial aspects of the extra-budgetary supplementary vocational education. The results of the study may be of interest for specialists dealing with educational problems, for higher educational institutions developing supplementary vocational education programmes, as well as for companies interested in developing their own system of supplementary education and in cooperation with universities. Keywords: supplementary vocational education, higher education institutions, sources of funding, perspective technological directions, Russia

This conceptual article describes the study of Russian universities’ place in the regions as compared to international universities. The data were collected within preparing analytical materials for the Priority Project «Universities as Innovation Centers», which was launched by the Ministry of Science and Education of the Russian Federation in 2016. This study develops the authors’ interpretation of the universities’ innovation practices management challenges. The article develops the collaborative model of managing innovations within universities, businesses, territories. The authors engage themselves in a discussion on the three university functions with a comparative study of national and international university practices. The objectives of the study are determined by the importance of generalizing and analyzing university transformational practices for identifying factors that contribute to a qualitative change in the way of managing the university infrastructure. The article is based on the methodology of comparative analysis and reconstructive analysis. The authors prove the urgency of collaboration which would ensure synchronization of transforming the region into a place for consumers of new practices, universities, businesses, and society to concentrate within the course of innovative change in the quality of life and production practices that create a gravity center for human capital. The research has its certain limits due to the experience of the universities in the study sample. The article is addressed to university leaders, to university research authorities, and to regional governmental officials, who are challenged with the task of improving the quality of life and creating conditions for the growth of social and economic systems that could be attractive for human capital.

The purpose of the article is to analyze training foreigners in Russian universities and conferring academic degrees to them during the latest five years. There has been used extensive statistical material on the system of higher education, including the level of postgraduate training and data on the network of dissertation councils. The subjects of the article include all levels of higher education, i. e. the system of certifying highly qualified scientific personnel, geographical distribution of students and postgraduates, Russian universities providing foreigners’ training and certification. The result of this research is the identification of top 10 countries using the Russian system of conferring academic candidate and doctor degrees. The study showed that 41 % of foreigners completed postgraduate studies with the defense of PhD thesis, which is twice as high as the average level of defenses in Russia (21 %). This fact can prove the necessity to increase in the medium term the number of PhD students and candidates of science in Russian universities. The study can also be a basis for developing managerial decisions at the federal level to work out the target indicators of the program «Development of the Export Potential of the Russian Education System». The article is approvingly supposed to introduce into the scientific circulation certain new factual data about the system of training and certifying higher scientific qualification staff, as provided for the foreigners.

The article attempts to analyse the current situation in training scientific and pedagogical personnel, as well as certain reasons for the low indicators of candidate-of-sciences theses defended in recent years. There are analyzed the state and dynamics of the system of postgraduate training in the post-Soviet period, including changes that came into force in 2013 and 2014 - those of assigning an educational status to postgraduate studies and of increasing requirements imposed on applicants of academic degrees. It is discussed how these changes fit the global context of postgraduate education development, whether they can be considered an explanation for the decrease of theses defences. The article proves that the negative trends observed today in the sphere of scientific and pedagogical personnel training are determined by the processes occurring in higher education and science in the post-Soviet period and by the problems arisen as a result of these processes. The empirical base of the research is a survey of 1,866 graduate students in 11 Russian universities participating in Project 5-100, as well as semi-structured interviews with 20 graduate students and 11 university staff responsible for the implementation of graduate programmes. The key problems of the Russian postgraduate studies identified on the basis of the empirical study are the following: (1) poor quality of enrollment; (2) poor quality of scientific advisory; (3) insufficient financial support of postgraduates. The article suggests possible steps to overcome these problems.

This conceptual article is based on the statistical data analysis of the changes in mid- and long-term needs and in the scope of personnel training within various systems of lifelong professional education. These data are used to hypothesize the potential direction of the development of this educational system in Russia and the conceptual priorities of the state policies in the area of professional education. The trends related to structural changes in lifelong professional education have never been systematically analyzed in Russia. Foreign statistics shows that such trends have first appeared in other developed countries. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to draw government officials’ and heads of professional educational institutions’ attention to the importance of restructuring the strategic goals of the educational system development, to identify the problem domain of working out the strategies for educational institutions and for the development of the professional education sphere. This purpose is achieved through the analysis of the macroeconomic parameters showing the need in personnel trained within professional educational programmes of various levels and through comparing the identified trends to those in other countries. The results show that the need for training personnel through the system of vocational professional education is much higher than that for training within traditional programmes of professional and higher education. The reason is the intensification of the technological progress and the objective incapability of the traditional educational programmes to provide specialists with competences required by the rapidly changing demands. As a result, the government and employers have to reconsider the priorities of professional education development and the ways to stimulate it. Still, there can be some limitations driven by weakly institutionalized system of interaction within the education management system, among employers and educational institutions.

Russian higher education is a turbulent environment. Nowadays, its main challenges are reducing government funding, integrating Russian universities into the international system of higher education, and changing the structure of competition for teachers and students within the global market. These modern trends are complemented by such factors as the transition to the Bologna process and a significant change in the format of bachelor and master degree studies. Moreover, the educational process intensively involves employers who increasingly demand to prepare «ready-to-work» graduates. These demands also impose certain duties on universities. One more additional challenge of modern higher education is a change in the requirements on professors, who have to combine teaching with research beyond just reproducing other people’s ideas to a student. Not less significantly does the format of teaching change due to modern technologies introduction, educational process informatization, and active online courses or «blended learning» involvement in the educational process. All these changes should be taken into account, as far as the activities of the educational institution are concerned. This article studies an academic supervisor of an educational programme’s organizational culture, leadership, and behavioural skills. The research is based on the analysis of the activities of 77 academic supervisors from the Higher School of Economics (HSE), this number including the supervisors of undergraduate and graduate educational programmes. The analysis covered 34.5 % of the total number of programmes (today, 72 undergraduate and 151 graduate programmes are being implemented in HSE). Since 2014, the Higher School of Economics has been using a model of supervisor-headed educational programmes. However, the supervisor’s functions are not documentarily specified, and every supervisor most likely understands them in his/her own way. Accordingly, the purpose of the study is to assess the practice of introducing academic supervisorship of educational programmes on the example of the Higher School of Economics, to identify its problems, and to determine the role models of academic supervisors based on the model of integrated competing values. Within the article, the latter model for working out the role model of an academic supervisor of an educational programme has been conceptualized, based on the study of his/her functionality, resource support, and degree of involvement in management processes.

Rapid changes in modern society and technological reality define significant difficulties in forming the development trajectory of technical universities. More and more discussions on the prospects for the economic faculties development in technical universities break out because of the most uncertainly indicated medium-term demand for economic and management specialties. An interdisciplinary approach becomes important not only in theoretic studies, but also for university graduates’ practical skills. The purpose of this paper is to justify the need and to work out a new model of economic faculties development in technical universities according to today’s economic and social demands. The article presents a critical theoretical and methodological analysis of Russian and foreign literature. The materials of the research are statistic, survey, and questionnaires data. There have been used methods of system analysis, of management theory, and of statistical data processing. The analysis showed, firstly, the increasing need for specialists in economic and management spheres providing the quality of human capital; secondly, existing qualification gaps between the professional competencies provided by universities and those required by employers; thirdly, the necessity to coordinate the interests of the four members of the labour market - state, employers, educational organizations, and students. The developed model is based on the principles of interdisciplinarity, universality, practical orientation, and takes into account modern economy digitalization requirements, as well as state educational and professional standards. Unlike other models, this one determines the main directions of economic faculties development, justifies the need for educational programmes for them to be oriented, and identifies the targeted competencies of students and teachers. The practical significance of the research is in the developed model results application, which makes it possible to improve the quality of the education in the spheres of economics and management, therefore increasing the efficiency of education and research in technical universities.

The state of the Russian university system is largely determined by the focus and content of state programmes for education development. This research article aims to critically analyze these programmes and contains a description of the original method for assessing their effectiveness. The method is based on comparing planned and real readings of target indicators, thus allowing to identify the «weak» places of the programmes, and can be used for working out new regulatory documents. The author shows that state programmes for education development have a number of systemic deficiencies and require external control by the university community over their performance. There are made two assumptions. First, the qualitative aspects of a programme, which are not quantitatively reflected in it, are not taken into account when assessing its effectiveness. Second, the comparison of planned and real readings of target indicators can be a tool for evaluating the programmes effectiveness. The degree of efficiency is assumed to be equal to the proportion of those indicators for which the real reading exceeded the target level. The analysis of four state programmes for education development shows that the real reading of the considered indicators was less than the target level. This result indicates a weak (or zero) effectiveness of state programmes for the higher education development, as far as achieving their goals is concerned. The author sees the solution of this problem in adding the mandatory broad discussion of the programmes by the scientific and pedagogical community to the procedure of working out and approving them. In order to strengthen public control over the higher education development programmes implementation, the author proposes to harmonize target indicators of programmes with indicators taken into account in the forms of official reporting and in the current system of monitoring universities.