Assessing the impact of higher education competitiveness on the level of socio-economic development of a country

The modern approaches towards higher education systems management often tend to focus on separate universities’ performance, lacking the systemic view of the overall higher education systems’ competitiveness. Thus, the policymakers often fail in tailoring the higher education strategies to the mission of higher education in contemporary society.
The article focuses on providing a systemic insight into the global competitive positioning of the national higher education systems. Based on the suggested ranking methodology, the authors perform the evaluation and ranking of 94 higher education systems, highlighting the limitations of this method, and the cluster analysis, identifying 3 types of their competitive positioning: leaders, followers, and underperformers. Based on Pearson coefficients of skewness and kurtosis calculation, the article shows that globally the inequalities in terms of higher education enrolment rate are decreasing, while those of R&D institutions quality and university-industry collaboration in research remain unchanged. Therefore, upgrading higher education quality assurance systems becomes the main strategic priority for the developing countries in terms of ensuring their higher education systems’ competitiveness. Given the levelling of higher education attainment and its quality worldwide, the authors anticipate further specialization of the universities and broadening of their role within the national innovation system. The article shows that the more comprehensive the approach for evaluating the higher education systems performance – the better the policymakers may benefit in terms of higher education strategic management.

In the conditions of Ukraine’s integration into the European educational area, it is vital to follow the trend of democratization of the society and obtaining freedoms in various spheres of the Ukraine’s development. Therefore, the concept of university autonomy is one of the key in development of the Ukrainian higher education system, whereas obtaining additional freedoms in management of the higher educational institutions
enhances its competitiveness. The concept of autonomy has a dual nature, thereby impacting the need to determine such a level of autonomy that would ensure high quality of higher education in the frame of the country’s national development. The article analyzes methodological approaches to calculation of autonomy of the higher education system in Ukraine. As a result, the methods of the European University, which include examination of autonomy by four components: organizational, staff, financial and academic, are chosen for the research. The development level method and the cluster analysis are selected as mathematical tools. Following the development level method, an integral indicator for each component of autonomy is obtained. On the basis of calculation, it is determined that Ukraine has a low level of autonomy across all the components. Through the use of the cluster analysis, 5 clusters of autonomy of the higher education system are built, whereupon they obtain their economic interpretation. Analysis of the Ukrainian higher education system’s place in the European educational area shows that the system of the Ukrainian higher education is categorized within the cluster with a low level of autonomy.

The article deals with research of global regularities in the global system of higher education. The interrelation of information, Internet and educational environments, branding and marketing are investigated as a qualitative basis for sustainable development of universities. The government strategies stimulating development of international experience for students are explored and analyzed. This experience resulted in mass opening of international branch campuses and popularity of educational centers (“education hubs”). World tendencies in the field of human capital development in the sphere of higher education are revealed. Special attention is given to development of international institutional and industrial partnership. At present, the challenges facing the modern system of higher education in Russia are related to the need to ensure its competitiveness in the international arena and create centers for the innovative development within the Russian Federation. In the sphere of higher education of Russia, a number of priority projects of the higher education system can be identified, which were approved at the end of 2016: “Universities as Centers of Innovation Development”; the project of “Modern Digital Educational Environment” and the model of the export potential development of the “Russian education system”, which increases the attractiveness and competitiveness of the international educational services market in order to increase the volume of revenues from the export of educational services.