Quantitative boundary conditions in higher education management

The article is of a research type and is devoted to the analysis of qualitative changes in the main parameters of higher professional education system in Russia as a result of managerial decisions. It seems reasonable to evaluate overall dynamics and parameter interaction describing social and economic system and educational sub-system as one of its elements. Nowadays we witness the imbalance between general unified methods and ways of influencing the system of higher professional education and peculiar features of missions and objectives of individual educational institutions. The reasons behind writing the article are related to the need in implementing more differentiated approaches to regulating activities of different types of educational institutions with the aim of upgrading efficacy and stability of educational system. Authors used the method of higher education activities monitoring results analysis, reference data on main parameters of the Russian Federation higher professional education system and normative documents of the recent years regulating its functioning. Conducted research demonstrates that the scope of the Russian higher professional education system is decreasing in terms of university numbers, number of students and lecturers which is a result of both social and demographic factors and policy. At the same type the combination of available educational programs is still quite extensive which requires skilled diversity management. Research results can be altered depending on the variations in the structure of changes in population employment structure and demographic numbers; possible changes in approaches to education system management on the basis of broadening or narrowing university's autonomy. It is suggested to introduce the differentiated approach to evaluating higher educational institution activities with clear division between performance criteria of licensing, accreditation and activity monitoring. A conclusion is made about specific modern qualitative development of the Russian higher educational system in the context of quantitative decrease in most of the parameters, which is the main difference as compared to wide-spread educational system growth models.