Педагогические науки/4.Стратегические направления реформирования системы образования

Popkova Yelena, Ruleva Yana

D. Serikbayev East-Kazakhstan State technical university, Kazakhstan

Modern tendencies of higher education marketization

Marketization is an effort to build up a market-like resource allocation system and develop competition between and within higher education institutions. Higher education has become a target for marketization agendas since the 1980s. Universities are urged to adopt commercial models of knowledge, skills, curriculum, finance, accounting, and management organization. They must do so in order to deserve state funding and to protect themselves from competitive threats.

Marketization is justified as self-defense by dealing with all relevant constituencies as business relationships where knowledge and education are considered as "goods", educational efficiency, accountability and quality are redefined in market terms; student-teacher relations are mediated by the consumption and production of things, e.g. software. The cost of the goods is often one of those surrogates – the more it costs, the higher its quality must be. This phenomenon is well known in higher education. A university, which increases its tuition by an amount large compared to the increases of its peers, results in a significant increase in student applications. The existence of this response has a great effect on the price and cost structures of universities, and acts against many efforts to hold down price.

Thus, Students would become customers or clients. And that is the matter of great importance. As the implicit aim, private investors would have greater opportunities to profit from state expenditure, while influencing the form and content of education. Business and university administrators would become the main partnership, redefining student-teacher relations. Marketization model can be extended to sell courses at a reasonable cost, potentially to anyone in the world. UK marketization agendas link two business meanings of flexibility. First, student-customers (or their business sponsors) seek learning for flexible adaptation to labour-market needs, e.g. through 'transferable skills' for employability. Second, universities face threats from global competitors which flexibly design and sell courses according to consumer demand. And at the same time industry wants education that is just enough to improve their production on current jobs and is not interested in losing their employees. For example, many companies supporting tuition do so on a course by course basis and will not support courses not considered relevant to the current job of an employee.

Universities must package knowledge, deliver flexible education through ICT, provide adequate training for 'knowledge workers', and produce more of them at lower unit cost. Markets promote efficiency through competition and the division of labour — the specialization that allows people and economies to do what they do best. Global markets offer greater opportunity for people to tap into more and larger markets around the world. It means that they can have access to more capital flows, technology, cheaper imports, and export markets. As a private good, higher education is in limited supply, not demanded by all, and is available for a price.

In the present state of affairs education quality plays the major role for university competitiveness, it should be compatible in the world labour market. That's the reason why there are certain standards of education recognized all over the world. If a university can provide qualitative education and knowledge it's possible for it to enter world educational space, which means in other words globalization of education.

As in any market, in educational market there is a demand and supply, that's why it's vitally important for any university to prepare specialists who are highly demanded both in the labor market of the certain country and in the whole world. Analyzing sites of Kazakhstani labor registry offices and experts' articles, in our country qualified engineers in metallurgy, oil and gas, building and IT sectors are in great demand. Industrial enterprises seek for experienced specialists with proficient knowledge of English and computer technologies. Paradoxically, in spite of great number of graduates from technical universities there is still a great deal of vacancies in the local labour market. The problem is that young specialists having immense ambitions and requiring high salary, in fact, don't know the real industrial process. Thus enterprises have to invest into teaching and training new employees though there is a serious threat that after being taught they leave for other employers for higher salary.

Reputation is also of great importance for universities well being to maintain their stability. Universities will not be impacted uniformly by this new competitive environment. At both the undergraduate and the graduate and professional levels, universities with lower reputation for traditional quality will be effected first, but the impact will rise over time to more highly ranked universities. In order to compete successfully in this new environment, universities will have to react in many areas. We will discuss four of these areas: mission focus, excellence, organizational change, and distance learning. Mission will need to be well understood and implemented by individual institutions, and its value clearly articulated to the public. An increased focus on excellence will be necessary, as will organizational changes that lead to greater efficiencies. Distance learning will be sufficiently transformational that special responses will be needed.

Taking into consideration all these facts we came to the conclusion that D. Serikbayev East Kazakhstan State technical university is able to be competitive in the Kazakhstan labour market as it prepares mostly professional of engineering specialties. Still the graduates from EKSTU will be highly demanded at any industrial enterprise on condition they have enough practical skills. For this purpose the university administration should cooperate with local and international industrial enterprises where students can do practical work. It is also important for students to participate in international exchange programs and to study abroad, as it is the most efficient way to get good experience and master foreign languages.

Faculty must play a key role in creating and maintaining institutional excellence. Certainly this means that faculty must strive to achieve individual excellence in their own research and teaching activities As we move into an era when multimedia teaching becomes the norm, universities will have to devote more of their resources to creating high quality, innovative courses. It is the very foundation of a free and prosperous society.

Литература:

1. Murray Turoff, Education, commerce and communicatons: The era of competition Copyright 1998. Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Distributed via the Web by permission of AACE

2. Lloyd Armstrong, A New Game in Town: Competitive Higher Education, 2000, November

,

Any college or university can now offer their courses and degrees at a reasonable cost anywhere in the world.

Competition is as wholesome in education as it is in manufacture and commerce.  Every school is an economic check on its competitors.  Some private schools and colleges still reject the public school position which consists of accepting the standard of the age and teaching political correctness.  They preach and foster a different morality that seeks social peace, harmonious interaction, and economic cooperation.  It is the same everywhere, free of geographic boundaries or distinctions of race.  It is the very foundation of a free and prosperous society.

TWO APPROACHES

One way of trying to understand the future is extrapolating current trends to their extreme and developing two contrasting scenarios to represent the future of distance education. This is quite easy to do in this case by merely contrasting choices based upon minimizing costs verses maximizing quality.

Characteristic	Maximum Efficiency	Maximum Effectiveness
Learning methodology	individual study and practice	collaborative learning oriented small groups
Instructors role	creator/presenter of "canned" reusable material (instructor may be virtual)	facilitator of groups exploring knowledge and a consultant on reaching understandings
Class sizes	thousands	ten to one hundred (with appropriate software)
Staff	graders and/or problem consultants.	Little or none, small group interactions
Objective	acquiring skills (e.g. how to do a derivative) and training	acquiring cognitive processes (application domain oriented problem solving), e.g. being able to conceptualize a derivative appropriate to investigating a physical problem
Similar current models	large mass lecture classes, TA problem solving groups	small graduate seminars
Social Outcomes	small number of totally virtual universities buying and reselling courses as needed	able to run courses appealing to only very limited numbers but having world wide student access
Control	largely organizational and market driven	faculty driven
Technology	Email, multimedia WEB documents, CAI software	group communications, collaborative Hypermedia knowledge bases and animation type recordings of thought processes.

As one reflects about the above breakdown it should be obvious that there is nothing wrong with having inexpensive ways to deliver skill training. However, for a good university the amount of skills taught as a part of any course should largely occur in the lower division years. What faculty really should be teaching students is how to do problem solving in their subject domain. To do this successfully requires a high degree of communication between the faculty and students so one can perceive if the learning process is successful and adjust it accordingly. To become an expert or "master" in a given field the student and the class need the intelligent guidance and insight that only an accomplished professional can provide.