Improving the System of Control of Universities’ in the Russian Federation

Abstract

The article reviews the existing system of control of universities’ activity in the Russian Federation. The authors single out two blocks of this system (internal and external) along with three components of external control of universities’ activity (state control; professional control; public control). The article describes the characteristic features of particular forms of state control over universities’ activity (state accreditation of educational programs, federal state control of education quality; federal state supervision over education); public control over universities’activity (public accreditation of educational programs, independent assessment of education quality); professional control over universities’ activity (professional and public accreditation of educational programs, assigning rating to universities); internal control over universities’ activity (self examination in higher educational institutions, internal control of a university as an economic entity, internal assessment of education quality). The article examines the effectiveness of control procedures applied to the main objects of control (educational programs, quality of students training, conditions of educational activity, target results of activity) and singles out the following basic trends of improving the control over universities’ activity: the increased importance of assessing the effectiveness of educational programs implementation and informal control procedures based on expert evaluations and sociological surveys. The following major directions of improving the system of control over universities’ activity in Russia are suggested: developing the state and professional system of control; establishing the audit trails of an educational system; creating the mechanisms of acknowledging the results of control by the inspectors and auditors of different level; shifting the emphasis of state control from formal methods to the check of substantive aspects (quality) of the educational process; developing the tools and methods of professional control over universities’ activity; adapting the indexes of universities global ratings to the special national features of higher educational institutions; developing the internal monitoring of effciency and quality of educational programs’ implementation and informal types of internal independent assessment of education quality.