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NON-GOVERNMENT SECTOR OF HIGHER EDUCATION:
TYPES OF INSTITUTIONS AND THEIR ROLE IN LIFELONG PROFESSIONAL TRAINING
T.V. Prok
The most recent history of non-government higher education in Russia has run concurrently with the emergence of a system of lifelong vocational education. Since then, public and private higher educational institutions have developed concurrently, and recently marked the 20th anniversary of their joint existence in 2010. It has been a long enough history to justify some reflection. In this report, we will try to classify the existing higher educational institutions in the non-government sector and examine their role in the system of lifelong vocational education.
We have identified five types or groups of institutions in the nongovernment sector of higher education by analyzing the initial conditions that accompanied their entry into the lifelong vocational training system.
The first type is represented by "heirs” to the Soviet education system. These schools arose from institutions that had existed in Soviet times, when they were affiliated with the Communist Party, the Komsomol or the trade unions. Some of these schools used to be retraining or requalification institutions for specific industries, or regional lecturing centers of Znanie Society, or something else. In the Soviet Union, this sector of vocational education was the closest thing the country had to a system of lifelong vocational education. These were the schools that quickly restyled themselves and became some of the first non-government educational institutions in Russia in the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. They had inherited more than just buildings and qualified teachers; they were experienced in teaching adults. There were hardly any retraining or re-skilling opportunities for adults in the public higher education system in the early 1990s. So, the newly emerging non-government institutions stepped into the niche successfully with all their vast experience from the previous decades, offering people second degree programs, retraining and re-skilling for the new qualifications that were in demand in the nascent market economy. Thus began the history of Russia’s earliest post-Soviet non-government higher educational institutions. The Moscow University of Humanities harks back to the Central School of Komsomol, established in 1944. The Academy of Labor and Social Relations in Moscow goes back to Instructors’ School, founded in 1919 and subsequently re-subordinated to the All-Union Central Board of the Trade Unions. St. Petersburg’s Humanities University of the Trade Unions, the largest non-government university in Russia, traces its history back to 1926. Russia’s best private universities
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have by now developed sprawling institutional networks with great numbers of students. They lead both the non-government sector of higher education and Russia’s higher education overall. These schools boast the broadest coverage in lifelong education and supplementary informal training, from preschool level to education for seniors. They are worthy rivals for public schools on all the levels of lifelong vocational education.
The second type of schools are, so to say, "schools d’auteur,’’ established by educators, scholars or education administrators with their own vision and philosophy of higher schooling. Schools d’auteur may be dedicated to teaching, engineering, medicine, environment or arts, but most focus on humanities. Unlike the first group of institutions, which are mostly based in Moscow or St. Petersburg, many schools d’auteur are located in the provinces. The best of them have staked out the place they deserve in the vanguard of regional higher education, and their very existence smoothes out various regional disparities in higher education. By the way they enter into the system of lifelong vocational training, schools d’auteur are close to their peers in the first group in that they cover all the stages of schooling: from preschool to post-graduate. What sets them apart is their "designer” take on the university aspect of lifelong learning. The leaders in this group were from the very beginning strategically committed to searching and experimenting with lifelong education concepts.
The third group is represented by the filial institutions of renowned public universities. These schools were founded by many well-known public universities to respond to the immediate needs of the educational services market by teaching such disciplines as Economics, Law and others. In most cases, they share their infrastructure, departments, teaching staff and other resources with their parent institutions. While this concept of a nongovernment institution is pretty solid in the educational services market, schools of this type usually follow in the footsteps of their parent public institutions.
The fourth group are "corporate schools,” representing a "second wave” of private educational institutions which emerged in the late 1990s or early 2000s. By that time, the labor market had become saturated with humanities professionals trained in the 1990s for jobs that were then much needed, but there was an acute shortage of engineers in the provinces. The new breed of schools filled the gap by offering degree programs in a variety of engineering fields: power, construction, automotive and so on. Private schools in this group offer "Specialist,” Bachelors and Masters degrees along with retraining courses for the engineering staff of regional corporations. In the system of lifelong vocational training, many corporate
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schools operate as multi-subject, multilevel educational institutions covering all the levels of professional training. But unlike their counterparts in the other three groups of non-government institutions, they enter into the lifelong vocational education system with a more narrow, more specialized spectrum of subjects.
In the fifth group, we find institutions frequently described as “commercial,” meaning that they were a product of the “higher education boom” established strictly for profit (which often meant that massive numbers of students were enrolled while the institutions lacked the facilities or resources to deliver quality education). During a time when supervision by education regulators was lax, many of these schools used unsuitable premises and had no appropriate resources or qualified teachers. That notwithstanding, they typically enrolled massive numbers of students through aggressive advertising. The management of these schools put profit at the top. Education strategy and quality were secondary in importance. The existence of schools like these was an embarrassment for the entire nongovernment sector of higher education. These institutions did not and do not have a high degree of inclusion in the overall system of lifelong vocational education.
As the non-government sector of public schooling arose and rapidly expanded on the cusp of the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries, a few “teething” problems sprung up along the way-one of them being a growing gap between non-public schools and their relative education quality. Inequality among non-government higher educational institutions has further deteriorated in the past few years due to higher competition due to worsening demographics and the aftermath of the economic downturn.
A look at the key quantitative trends at present in the non-government sector of higher education suggests that active emergence of new nongovernment or private educational institutions is now a thing of the past.
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