EDUCATION AS THE MERIT AND PRIVATE ECONOMIC GOOD: EMPIRICAL RESULTS OF MONITORING RESEARCH (RUSSIA 2001-2010)

Economic theory defines the market for higher education as an intellectual due to a system where product demand is formed by the higher education institutions. The emergence of fee-based forms of learning involves the formation of market relations and the determination of the price of such services. The higher education market arises in Russia together with the reform of other spheres of economic life in order to create out education as a public good and commercial product. But the socially important role of the product can not identify education as a pure product of the market. The possibility of establishing education as a market product is formed in connection with the inseparability of the existing system of educational services from the labor market as the end user. That product, which will be formed as a result of passage through the educational arrangements will ultimately be evaluated in the labor market to potential employers. In this regard, the derived demand for labor determines the inability to fully assess the potential employee, and thus the assessment of the necessary volume of investment in the future to produce similar working qualities.
Due to the results of the Russian monitoring research, the demand function for the benefit of the educational services of higher education is characterized by high elasticity of demand for its income. Rational choice of consumer goods educational services to higher education is characterized by awareness generation selection criteria: the future earnings, future interesting work, the prestige of a diploma, the prestige of the university, etc. All this allows us to consider the benefit of educational services of higher education in contemporary socio-economic conditions of both affordable and characterizes it as luxury, attributive good with derivative benefits.