Entrepreneurial education on graduate level: current state and new challenges

This article continues the series of publications devoted to the study of entrepreneurial curricula at Russian universities and their impact on the formation of the small and medium business sector in our country. A study of entrepreneurial curricula at the graduate level has been carried out. In general, our analysis shows the underdevelopment of entrepreneurial education at the graduate level in Russian universities. Also, our data confirm the existence of a significant gap between the attempts of entrepreneurial activities of the universities and the content of the graduate curricula they implement. Among the results of the our research, we can note that the master's curricula in entrepreneurial education is potentially the most perspective and in demand for solving the problems of regional development. Analysis of the programs for the development of «basic» universities, a new group of Russian universities formed to support the development of territories, shows that most universities recognize their challenges and activities in this area, however, the level of existing practices does not yet allow us to speak about the sustainability of the process of creating new master's curricula in entre-preneurship. A significant methodological and content limitation of the formation of master's curricula in entrepreneurship is the unresolved issues of the correlation between hard and soft skills, future skills in the system of graduate education. The professional community has not yet developed approaches to the development of curricula, teaching technologies that meet the modern demands in entrepreneurial education. There are the lack of discussion platforms on these topics, discussions are mostly concentrated in several universities and the Russian Association for Entrepreneurship Education. The question of taking into account the educational results obtained in other universities and types of entrepreneurship curricula, in particular on the Master of Business Administration (MBA) programmes, remains a difficult issue. Coinciding for a large part of the content, requirements and learning outcomes, they are in different «weight» categories and are difficult to integrate, contrary to common sense. It seems to us that the existing approaches to the financing of the graduate programmes practically do not give a chance to create educational products of the required quality. If there is no drastic change in funding standards, the set of graduate programs will for the most part remain slightly improved undergraduate programs, including in the graduate level of entrepreneurial education.