OECD Higher Education Stakeholder Forum Kicks Start to 2 Benchmark Projects
Sergei Malinovsky, Deputy Director of the HSE Institute of Education, who attended the Forum, has commented on the key challenges of the Forum.
The first project, “Effectiveness benchmarking of higher education systems” requires comprehensive comparison of the efficiency of higher education systems in the OECD member countries. In the future, it could enable conducting cross-country comparisons of various aspects of higher education, with a view to identifying the most fruitful and advantageous practices in order to promote them further.
Another project involves in-depth analysis of labor markets and correspondence of higher education systems to the challenges of modern economies. The project aims not only at the development of tools for comparative monitoring of skills and competencies, required for the modern management of the economy, but also at the support and fostering of networks for collaborative learning.
Both projects are interrelated, package implemented, and the tools generated within them would be used to compare different countries and to find out the factors of effectiveness, which then could be applied in national educational policies. The participants of the forum checked out the structure and composition of indicators for monitoring the transformation of higher education systems. They arranged the indicators in such display units as management, participation in higher education, funding for higher education, commitment to the labor market, internationalization, etc. A typology of competences and skills that are in demand on the modern labor market was introduced, as well.
The Forum is just a branch of a broader international dialogue, whose participants also take part in implementation of other OECD projects on higher education. The analytical materials obtained in those projects will facilitate modeling of an optimal structure of the higher education system. They will also provide designers of reforms in higher education with some practical knowledge on the ways various tools of education policy function and on the means to enhance efficiency of the process.
Further participation of Russian experts in these projects will enable to complete the cooperation process on education policy with the OECD, adding the line of higher education, which is under-represented at the moment, to the relatively gross involvement of Russia in the projects on general education.
In the nearest future, an OECD report on transformation of higher education systems, describing national cases and summing up best practices, will be finalized. The work on the projects, with a broader range of higher education stakeholders discussing them, will carry on, and the next meeting is scheduled for autumn 2016.
Malinovsky Sergei
Deputy Director