Financing of Higher Education as a Factor of Human Capital Development

Abstract

The subject of the research is the sources of financing of higher education in Russia and abroad. The purpose of the work is to consider the specifics of the development and financing of the regional education system in the Russian Federation. As a result of the study, insufficient financing of the higher education system was established in comparison with the leading countries of the world, and trends were revealed to reduce expenditures on higher education from the state budget and insufficient stimulation of the development of endowment funds in Russia, which in foreign countries, especially in the USA, are among the largest investors in the higher education system. Based on the study of approaches to assessing the effectiveness of investing in higher education, the main features of the development of the regional education system in Russia are identified: competition of universities for state funding; the creation of one or two leading universities in the regions, leading to the monopolization of regional higher education markets; as a rule, the salary level of scientific and pedagogical workers in the regions is significantly lower than in the capital, despite the fact that the level of training of graduates in a number of specialties and the competitiveness of certain areas of scientific research may be higher; incorrect accounting of sectoral and regional training needs in the distribution of admission control figures to universities; rapid growth of publications with real scientific value in the journals of the Scopus and Web of Science databases due to competition between universities for research funding.
Conclusions are drawn about the need to increase the efficiency of financial investments in regional education systems in order to achieve National development goals by making a number of adjustments to the indicators determining the quality of education that will be used for accreditation of higher education institutions for educational programs of higher education, the introduction of a new indicator of the effectiveness of regional education systems “The share of graduates employed in the field of small, medium, individual entrepreneurship, including the self — employed, in the total number of employed graduates”.