SYNOPSIS: The author gives a brief description of the development of higher education in the world during the last twenty years. There is an analysis of pros and cons of non-state education together with a number of factors that put non-state colleges and universities into unfavorable conditions in Russia. Some innovative characteristics of the Prikamsky Social Institute are depicted as well.

The development of every country is characterized by specific features of its educational development. It happens due to history, politics, and other factors. National education has become a priority in many political programs of different political leaders. At present education has become accessible for millions.

During the last twenty years the number of students in the world has increased 6.5-7 times – from 12 million to 90 million [7].

The first public order which the first President of Russia, Boris Yelstin, signed was the decree “About Education”. This decree was caused by the urgent necessity to change Russian education and to find new ways for possible reforms.

Political and economic changes, which have been happening in Russia at the end of the 20th century, and up until this present time, have seriously influenced quality changes of the social institutions in the country. Many high tech enterprises were closed and as a result, a number of engineers and technicians were laid off all over the country, many professionals lost their jobs. The unemployment rose tremendously and the necessity to retrain specialists because urgent. New industrial enterprises demanded highly qualified specialists but the county lacked them; teaching, restoring, and developing new qualified specialists demanded large expenditures of funds, time, and labor.

The stratification of Russian society has brought a number of prosperous people who are able to cover new needs in education. This process, in a way, helped to start up many for-profit schools and departments in public universities where employees and managers of different public enterprises could receive their second diplomas. Gradually, the society came to understand that investing into human intellectual development could be profitable. The level of an individual “profitability” as well as the profitability of the state increases together with the level of the education of its population [1, p. 12].

Theory knows, but practice ignores, that a modern economy based on knowledge presupposes that more than half of the population of a country should have a college diploma. In Russia today, we have 24% of the population with a college diploma. If we preserve this same ratio of students to the population of Russia, then, by 2020, every third citizen of Russia, of a productive age, will have a college diploma, and Russia will be able to base its economy on knowledge within the next 30-35 years.

In spite of the fact that the majority of young people want to study, the educational bureaucrats and the creators of reforms constantly keep asking the question, “Who needs this?”, and they immediately change the law for current universities, students, and high school graduates. It is evident that newly adopted reforms most certainly will “help” to close a number of colleges, and it will definitely block the changes for a number of young people to receive a diploma in higher education [14, p. 22].

It goes without saying that updating any industrial enterprise demands constant in-service training for its employees. We can observe the situation where employers are constantly competing for new employees. Corporations are extremely interested in hiring people with high analytical capacities and with the capacity to seek out new opportunities in their chosen fields [4, p. 34]. It is impossible to develop, implement, and use new technologies without such specialists. Businesses should reimburse the State and its educational institutions for the training of their specialists. Training employees who will be working for private enterprises should not be free, but regardless of the urgent necessity to solve this issue Russian business does not involve itself in this process.

There is a number of changes in the sphere of education as well. Before 1990, the problems of higher education were considered a high priority by the Russian government, but beginning in the 1990s, radical changes were introduced. On the one hand, Russia intensified its economic development, introduced a number of new information technologies which, by itself, increased the importance of higher education -- on the other hand, Russia decreased public funding for education. While the Russian government guaranteed every citizen the right to secondary education, it was not able to guarantee that same right to a higher education. A large stratification between different social groups stimulated a large difference in access to a professional education. The number of potential students from rural areas of the country has decreased.

Cuts in public funds caused a reduction of students who could receive higher education in public universities for free, and those who had to pay for their education being students of public universities was also limited.

As a result, there came a problem of incompatibility of market demands and offers to provide higher education; this caused innovations such as “contract teaching”. Usually the amount of money, which a Russian family has to pay for placing their child on this contract teaching variant, into a public university or college, is higher than the family can afford. This happens because of the low salaries of public employees and rural population, and together they still constitute the majority of the working population in Russia. Demands for a higher educational diploma in Russia remain strong. This can be explained by a number of changes, mostly connected to the values orientation of the population, growth of the social prestige of higher education, and the desires of young people to obtain higher employment positions in society. Not everybody can pay annually 200,000 - 230,000 rubles. In this situation, Russian non-state sector of education plays the role of a financial alternative which allows potential students to choose a variant depending on their prosperity and a place of living [5].

In 2008, prices for educational services at public universities were, on average, 20-25% higher than in non-state universities. This fact by itself has helped to raise the popularity of non-state higher education. The price is a very important factor while consumers make their decisions at the “market” of educational services.

An alternative sector of higher education -- non-state universities, gives young people changes to receive college diplomas. Not everyone in the country welcomes non-state education as no one always welcomes anything that is new. Most of the countries do not differentiate between legal property and social status of non-state and state universities; usually countries treat these universities equally. In Russia, non-state universities do not receive any help or support from the State, at the same time they have to pay high taxes, very high rents, and cover other expenses, which, on the whole, complicates their development [14, p. 25].

The Association of Non-State Russian Universities considers that non-state institutions have become a serious factor in the country that cannot be simply avoided by the State. Although, in comparison to public universities, non-state universities happen to be in a very unfavorable and unequal position: a) non-state university students pay twice -- first for themselves, directly to their non-state university, and second for “another guy” in the form of taxes which cover public university enrollment; b) rent expenses for public universities are 200 times less than in non-state universities; c) representatives of state universities are the majority in organizations which evaluate the quality of education (let us not forget that they evaluate their competitors); d) until now, non-state universities were not allowed to participate in any contest which might have given them public funding [17].

Let us look now at the term “non-state”. It does not really characterize any educational establishment if we keep in mind that it works inside the country and not for its own profit. The federal law “About Education” has defined the legal foundations of the non-state sector of higher education in Russia. The State provides any non-state university with a license and all necessary documents for its activities. Teaching students is based on curriculum plans and syllabi approved by the Information-Methodical Accreditation Center and composed in accordance with State educational standards. It would be more logical to divide all higher educational establishments in Russia into two groups: budget-based -- stateand out-of-budget self-financed -- non-state. There is a large difference in the process of creating non-state educational establishments in comparison with private companies in industry and trade. The latter just privatized public institutions, the former created new ones. Looking back, it is becoming more and more evident that during the last decade of the 20th century when higher education in Russia was in a very poor condition, non-state universities helped the whole system of higher education to recover from a shock and to gradually restore its numbers and quality which tremendously increased the ratio of students in the population [10].
We have mentioned before that only the Law of 1992 made payments for higher education legal but people did pay long before the law was codified. For example, the majority of Soviet high school students had to pay private tutors to be better prepared for their entrance exams. These were illegal educational services. The appearance of the legal segment of non-state higher education has significantly changed the “Russian educational market”. By the beginning of 2009, the country possessed 755 state higher educational establishments and 674 non-state [9].

Non-state educational establishments are not new for Russia. In pre-revolutionary Russia, such universities would be called “free” or “free >

History teaches us that non-state, free education developed most rapidly when the country wanted to receive quick results in the shortest amount of time. Its no wonder that the blossoming of non-state higher education in Russia happened at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries and also during the first World War (in 1915-1917 12 non-state universities were opened in Russia, including the Perm university) -- the main reason was to strengthen the economic and defensive status of Russia with the help of education. This allows us to conclude that the re-birth of the system of non-state higher education, alongside other changes in all spheres of life, is the continuation of historical Russian traditions [10].

Non-state educational establishments have become elements of a national active market and they provide a number of services to their consumers. Apart from anything else, new educational establishments allowed the solution to a number of important social issues: a) educational fees were used to improve the financial basis and status of their educational establishments; b) new working positions were created and many qualified college instructors received an opportunity to work simultaneously in different institutions; c) the ability of higher education to train and re-train specialists was improved together with training for new professions -- especially for those which were in high demand; d) the primary task of any society was finally solved -- that is, by giving education a society helps its members to gain self-esteem and to understand that society values their potential.

The number of students in the non-state sector of higher education is 10% of all the students in Russia. In most regions of Russia non-state universities constitute 30-50% of all colleges. This means that non-state universities have been finally accepted as a norm in society. Non-state education is extremely important in large industrial regions of the Urals (the Perm region is one of them) where the majority of the population is still working in the Defense Industry and heavy manufacturing and who, at the end of the 1990s, lost their jobs.
The population of the Perm region is 2,718,200 with 75% of the population being urban (statistics of the Perm region, January 1, 2008). The territory of the region is 160,600 square kilometers and it is situated on the border between Europe and Asia but the average density of the population is only 17 people per square kilometer. This is twice less than the average density in the region’s competitors but it is higher than the average in Russia (8.5 people per one square kilometer). Analysis of developed countries shows that such a density of population is not sufficient for the intensification and modernization of any production; the most efficient is a density with 50 people per square kilometer; compared with Japan with 337 people per square kilometer, Germany -- 230, Italy -- 192, Switzerland -- 181 [15, p. 17].

The length of the Perm region is 645 kilometers from North to South and 420 kilometers from East to West. More than 70% of the region is covered in forests. Every square kilometer, in terms of its natural resources, is priced at $2,000,000 USD. The main branches of industry are connected with oil processing, forestry, chemical and fertilizer production, and mechanical engineering. The region is considered to be higher than average in its development. It is a “region-donor.” At the same time, there are a number of problems in the region. One of the most critical of these is education. The 2002 All-Russian Census showed that the Perm region was the 70th in education. This level of education was enough in the time of socialist production when the quality of employees was a problem. The Perm region is 2 times behind its neighboring regions when comparing higher education and the number of students. The number of working adults with higher education diplomas is only 174 per 1,000 people with the average Prevolzhski district is 200 per 1,000 and in Russia, in general, it is 232 per 1,000.

In accordance with a survey arranged by consulting companies at the beginning of 2008, 52% of 1,000 industrial enterprises and businesses experienced a lack of qualified workers. The reason was the development of the economy of the Perm region that had its distortions in the structure of labor resources and business demands [13].

In accordance with the Center of Employment, during 2008, 13,800 workers were laid off or left their jobs; today the number is much higher, and it is still increasing every quarter.

In the 2000-2001 school year there were 15 state higher educational establishments (including 3 branches), 3 non-state educational establishments, and 1 branch of one Moscow university in Perm. At that time, non-state universities had 63,980 students and non-state had 2,057. For a city with over 1 million people this is not a large number of students. But, the number has dramatically changed in the Perm region already since the 2008-2009 school year. At that time, we had 18 state and 13 non-state higher educational establishments with 88,988 students in state universities and 16,434 in non-state universities [2].

The demand for higher education is increasing in Russia as well as in the Perm region. It can be interpreted by the growing expectations of potential students who realize that quality professional higher education is a true “social elevator” which allows students to start well and rapidly develop their professional careers. Today, the ratio of students in the Perm region is 320 per 10,000 population. On October 1, 2008, all the higher educational establishments in the Perm region had 105,423 students. In comparison with the previous year (2007) the number of students had increased by 4.3% [2].

But the Perm region, as well as Russia on the whole, is experiencing a serious demographic crisis which is characterized by early deaths in the population and an overall reduction of the population due to aging, plus a lower birthrate at the end of the 1980’s to the beginning of the1990’s when the annual birthrate decreased by 33% in the Perm region [15]. In 2009, we have already experienced the impact of this demographic decrease across the county. The reduction of high school graduates and new enrollment procedures like the United State Exam (USE) have brought a very difficult competition to the educational market across the country.

The non-state sector of higher education is rapidly growing in the Perm region and in Russia on the whole. This sector consists of different institutional forms, including independent universities and colleges, local branches, and local offices in other cities and regions. As a result, a number of students in this sector have grown by ten times in the last ten years [16]. In the Perm region such students are twelve percent of the total number of students.

Till the present moment the local “educational market” allows “peaceful co-existence” of both state and non-state educational establishments because each of them have their advantages which determines the choice of students and at times, of their parents. Let us briefly look at the number of advantages that non-state educational establishments have in comparison with state ones:

less expenses per student;

constant readiness to change teaching programs, syllabi, and professions – factors which allow any college to remain competitive;

high flexibility of the teaching process;

comfortable for students teaching schedule;

a system of studies based on a blocks’ type;

an individual approach to every student;

new educational technologies;

creative approach to teaching;

a democratic atmosphere and respect of every student [17].

As for state universities, they can still boast by issuing diplomas which are more attractive and valuable for a number of businesses, and also by having a wider choice of teaching programs and fields.

One of the new tendencies is the growing sector of “based-on-payment” education provided by state universities. The reason is not the growing number of non-state universities but the reduction of “free-of-charge” education within the state universities.
Today, in spite of the tough competition, non-state higher educational establishments prove to be a true part of the educational system of Russia on the whole. Perm experiences the same tendency, preserving the same number of independent non-state higher educational establishments as the last year [18, p.3]; the largest among these five is Prikamsky Social Institute (PSI).

Prikamsky Social Institute is the final element of the system of continuing education called “Association of Continuing Education for the 21st Century” with the main task -- to create a system of consistent succession of all stages of personal development, from preschool to any adult age. During the eleven years of its existence the Association has managed to receive state licenses and to fulfill all the accreditation procedures for every establishment within itself. The creation of this unique holding was both socially necessary and expedient for Perm and the region. It has grown in quality and quantity and has become one of very successful institutions in the Urals with the increase of the number of students from 150 to 3,500.

The institute is widely known in the Perm region; this fact can be explained by high quality education and large numbers of students, and wide promotional work, organized in Perm and other regional industrial centers such as Solikamsk, Berezniki, Dobryanka, Kungur, Lysva, and Chaikovsky. Students are represented not only by Perm and Perm region, but also by Tumen, Svrdlosk, Kirovsk, and Krasnodar regions, Moscow and Samara, Tatarstan and Udmurtiya. During the whole period of its existence PSI has issued over 2,400 higher educational diplomas; most of its graduates are successful employees in the chosen field.

Prikamsky Social Institute (PSI) is a “non-for-profit partnership” which does not pursue making profit and which does not distribute any possible profit among its founders. All the profit is forwarded towards the development and improvement of the teaching process. This by itself made PSI stable and popular in the society.

Non-state higher educational establishments prefer teaching by correspondence; the number of students by correspondence is 82.4% out of the total number of students [12]. The Russian Bureau of Statistics states that every second Russian student receives his or her education by correspondence. PSI has 71% percent students by correspondence. Most popular among freshmen and high school graduates are “Jurisprudence” and “Organizational Management.” This is regardless of the fact that the Russian market is full of lawyers and economists. We consider that these fields give such a universal knowledge that these specialists can work as executives of public and commercial companies, in tax collection services, customs offices, and also in the system of Russian police and justice. The whole country has the same number of lawyers as just the City of New York itself. Different regions badly need notaries, advocates, and judges. Moscow has 300,000 small enterprises and only 10% of them have their own lawyers. This is a profession that is still in high demand and highly applicable in the market [8].

The modern market economy has made the manager’s position very popular. The growing number of management schools is a natural reaction in higher education to the modern demand. We should keep in mind that such schools provide their students not only with knowledge in management but they also help to re-train large numbers of specialists and adapt them to the market economy. Today (2009) many professions and fields have certain commercial elements but usually neither teachers nor doctors or engineers can see beyond their profession though modern life can not allow this luxury any longer. As a result, many graduates of the 1990s continue their education in different management schools and receive knowledge that is critical for modern life [6, p. 22].

PSI is determined to keep and develop its pedagogical traditions and learn and transmit the best experience of others. Increasing students presupposes increasing professors and other instructors. It is important to note that new instructors are usually young, their age is typically no more than 30. The main principle in staff relations is respect for senior colleagues, creating an atmosphere of trust, kindness, and comfort.

Much attention is paid to student research activities. Students work in cooperation with instructors to prepare teaching materials and manuals for “management” and “psychology”, and by itself it stimulates an interest in learning and science. PSI students are active participants and winners of many all-Russian educational and social contests and students Olympiads. One of the students of the law school received a diploma and a silver prize for the project “Law Clinic as a Tool to Develop a Professional Lawyer in the System of Youth Institute of Human Rights Representative.” This competition was organized by the Russian State Duma in order to celebrate its 100th anniversary. The co-founder of this competition was the non-profit “National System of Scientific Creative and Innovational Activities of Russian Youth.”

PSI gives not only knowledge but also valuable experience in research and also helps with student professional development. The main condition of successful activities of the PSI non-state educational establishment is an individual approach to teaching and learning. A number of strategies in working individually with the best students and with those who fall behind allow the development of the highest personal potentials of every student. Most graduates are very successful in business, management, social services, and jurisprudence. It is important to note that PSI graduates are also successfully working abroad – in the Czech Republic, Spain, and the United States.

PSI is heavily involved in research projects in the city of Perm. It fulfills tasks of different organizations, institutions, and the administration of Perm and the Perm region. It is also active in charitable work in the field of education, culture, science, and healthcare. These activities are, without doubt, very important for a modern society and the development of higher education.

And last but not least, non-state educational establishments not only prepare future specialists in different fields but they also attract students from the streets, help to form important social skills, and in this way they partially solve the problems of character education and moral education. All this is done at the expense of a student’s parents and not the Russian State.

The activities of any non-state educational establishment, as of a component of a larger social system, are directed towards important individual needs. Meeting the needs of education, any individual manages to grow to the highest level of consciousness that is public consciousness. The future of Russian society, to a large degree, depends on the level of success in this process.

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