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HIGHER EDUCATION REFORMS EVALUATED BY ACADEMIC TEACHING STAFF:
RISKOGENIC FACTORS
A.M. Tikhomirova
The author focuses on highlighting “riskogenic” factors in an evaluation of transformational processes in the higher education system. The developed method of evaluating university lecturers' attitudes towards reforms and changes makes it possible to obtain significant theoretical and practical results that demonstrate the need for radical solutions in the higher education system.
Key words: higher education reform, educational risk, transformation risk, continuous education.
The present-day society is often termed as a "riskogenic" one. Such an appraisal is connected to the multitude of transformational processes running in society simultaneously. Risks are usually viewed as dangers, as something that brings about negative consequences. However, many scientists (and the article author agrees with them) state that risks can also be opportunities ensuring positive changes. The Russian Federation joined the Bologna process, a trend in modernization of the educational system, in 2002. This came during a period of anomie characterized by multiple social changes in various spheres of social life in the Russian Federation. The population as a whole and many socio-professional groups were forced to concern themselves with satisfying their basic needs, to seek means of subsistence, and to ensure safe lives for themselves and their families. Therefore, the changes in the educational system did not attract attention immediately and to the full extent. The state withdrew from informational support of the program of reforms in the educational system; therefore, the idea and sense of the changes in progress, as well as their intermediate results, were not made known to the population. Only sporadic comments about the education reforms could be encountered at that time; they were clearly not enough. As a result, during the period of transition to continuous education and the formation of a two-tier higher education system, the majority of the population was out of touch with the situation, and in the face of accomplished facts. As a result, the population began to resist the reform processes. This resistance is looming large. The resistance to reform processes can be felt among the higher school teaching personnel as well. The bureaucratic, formalist and statistical approach to the new educational system is not accepted in modern universities too. This fact can be confirmed by the results of opinion polls as well.
A multitude of system risks arose in connection with the processes of higher professional education reform; the analysis of those risks became a popular research topic. E.g., the risks as hazards to the higher professional education system are analyzed in detail by A.Yu. Kazak and Yu.E. Slepukhina [1]. The authors deal in detail with hazards for the higher school, such as: lack of a positive synergetic effect of merging universities specializing in different fields into Federal Universities, substantial reductions in faculty and staff, the reduced quality of
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bachelor degree holders' education (as compared to specialized education) and consequently, slumping demand for such graduates on the employers' part; the hazard of the loss of highly qualified teaching staff by higher educational institutions, and formalization and bureaucratization of the teaching process.
Within the framework of the study "Transformational Risks of the Higher Professional Education System" (Project 13-06-00635) financed by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, we have elicited the following risks: (1) the risk of noncompliance of specialist training specializations offered by higher educational education to economic needs and the labor market situation; (2) the risk of a loss of specialist training quality as a consequence of universal accessibility of higher education, lack of enrolment competition (the emergence of "quasi-specialists"), because of increased volume of students' independent work when students have poor independent work skills, (3) education modernization risks connected to a different understanding of the meaning and import of the transformations underway by the administrations of the higher educational institutions, teaching personnel, and students, and their low awareness about trends in changes of the higher educational system, (4) education modernization risks caused by peculiarities of the Russian mentality: disbelief in reform results, a tendency to "reinvent the wheel", absence of individual responsibility for adopted decisions and labor results, hoping for a miracle and habitual routines of teaching activities in higher educational institutions, the habit of promoting students in spite of their poor results; (5) the risks connected with non-compliance of the statutory regulation of higher educational institutions’ educational activity to the goals and targets of modernization of education; (6) risks caused by teaching staff's poor motivation for modernizing education and working under new conditions; (7) the risk of a shortage of higher educational institutions teaching and research personnel; 8) the risk of teachers' and students' handwaving; (9) the risk of formalized and biased use of the point rating system of students' knowledge and teachers' labor evaluation.
Some aspects of the risks were already described in previous publications. This article concentrates on the risks connected with academic staff's attitude to the reforms and risks occurring because of students' actual educational practices conflicting with the trend of higher education reforms. The article is based on a number of studies carried out in 2014-2015 and devoted to this range of problems (approximately 2,000 people were surveyed). There were mass student and academic staff opinion polls, as well as semi-formalized interviews with the heads of some Yekaterinburg higher educational institutions.
The opinion of the majority of pollees about the present state of the higher professional education was negative. There were the following assessments: 34.8% of pollees believe that the education system is in a "crisis", 28.4% view it as "degradation"; 15.9%, as "stagnation". A few pollees that chose the "other" answer formulated the answers on their own (two persons evaluated the present state of the higher education sphere as an "intentional crackup", one, as a "collapse", and yet another one, as "slavish imitation of the West". Thus, 80.7% of the pollees considered the state of things as negative. Only 8.4% pollees rated it positively: these people considered the state of higher professional education as "efflorescence" (2.3%) and a "rise" (6.1%). Another 2.7% of pollees rated the
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situation in neutral terms, naming the present state of the higher professional education system in the Russian Federation as "a period of change" or "a transition period", while 8.2% were undecided.
Expert opinions are as follows: "Our education system is dying," "It is sad to see increasing lagging of our higher education and science as compared to world standards. As long as 22 years ago, the Chinese understood that our education and science research system has nothing interesting or advanced in it any more, and stopped sending their graduates to us." Experts expressed themselves on the subject of reforms in education as a whole: "... it is wrong to focus on the Bologna process only while carrying out the reforms of higher professional education in Russia. The Bologna process is only Europe, and now there are other educational centers as well. Our country must focus on the international experience as a whole," "the reforms are desultory and unsystematic in nature: they do not reach the heart of the matter, and many measures are superficial and haphazard. The reforms in their present form are a disorganization of the education system. We need a longer period for the implementation of reforms, and they must be implemented on a voluntary basis: some universities should scout the path." The experts expressed their opinions about specific components of the higher professional education reform, stressing the fact that only the transfer to a two-tier education system has started working properly for the time being. The first expert considered greater individualization of education schemes, and greater flexibility of the education system as a whole and of graduates as the primary benefits of that transfer.
A number of questions in the questionnaire permit one to analyze changes in the motivation and nature of labor of the teaching staff. An overwhelming majority of pollees (78.0%) considers the motivation of the teaching staff for the implementation of higher education reforms as insufficient. Only one-fifth (21.5%) of our pollees considers this motivation as satisfactory and sufficient. The experts stressed the lack of higher educational institution employees' motivation for active participation in the implementation of reforms. Faculty members assessed the future of the higher school in connection with reforms in the following way: the response that "the Russian higher education system must retain its national identity and harmonize with foreign higher education systems" was the most popular (more than half of the pollees chose it). However, in view of the fact that both responses that were chosen by the majority of pollees mention the national character, and the national specificity of the Russian higher education system, one can conclude that this aspect is of importance for the overwhelming majority of faculty members.
The poll of faculty members permits one to conclude that the inadequate labor remuneration system, increased academic workloads, increased formalization and bureaucratization of academic activity, as well as the decrease in quality of students' prior training (which impedes teaching as well) bring about the dominant negative assessment of reforms, and the low motivation of the teaching staff for introducing innovations to the teaching process. All this increases riskogenity, and creates hazards for future development of higher professional education.
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Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translastions Bureas
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