Educational trends among contemporary Russian youths

This article represents an analytical review of the main trends which were identified based on statistical data for the year 2015 provided by the State policy department in the higher educational field, the State policy department in the field of personnel training and additional professional education (APE), and the Federal State Statistics Service. The authors focused their attention on such issues as the balance between labor market demand and demand for various levels of education among university applicants, the student contingent and its involvement in higher, secondary and primary professional education, admission forecasts. Also considered is an “Atlas of new professions”, which describes fields of specializations which will soon appear on the labor market, and professions which will soon disappear from it. Primarily such changes are due to the development of and the demand for information technologies. The main result of the study is the establishment of four currently relevant trends in the field of contemporary Russian education. The first of them has to do with a tendency for mass scale. The second trend is a decrease in involvement in primary professional education and a slight increase in involvement when it comes to secondary professional education, while there has been a drastic increase in involvement in higher professional education. As a result we face a situation when there are not enough specialists in “labor” trades. Trend number three – a disproportionate popularity of certain specialties among applicants given a lack of labor market demand for such an amount of specialists. Trend number four – there is a discrepancy when it comes to professions that are currently popular (be it in economics, education or medicine) and the demands of all sectors of the economy primarily connected with information technologies. The presented data gives the opportunity to bring up statistical data for the years 2016-2017 and “complete” the trends, figure out which of them will remain important.

the Bologna system, higher professional education, secondary professional education, primary professional education, atlas of professions, admission forecasts.

Atlas novykh professiy [The Atlas of new professions]. The website. URL: http://atlas100.ru/ [date of visit: 15.07.2017]. (in Russ.)

Indikatory obrazovanija: 2017 [Indicators of education 2017]. National Research University The Higher School of Economics Official website URL: https://www.hse.ru/primarydata/io2017 [date of visit: 27.08.17]. (in Russ.)

Vysshee obrazovanie v Rossii: novosti, problemy, tendencii [Higher education in Russia: news, problems, trends]. Ed. by I. N. Frolov. Moscow, Academic Holding, 2017, pp. 70–75. (in Russ.)