FEATURES OF AN ASSESSMENT OF COMPETITIVENESS OF RUSSIAN UNIVERSITIES IN NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

The objective is to show the features in approaches to an assessment of competitiveness of the local universities in the international and national level of the educational environment. These features are determined by the government regulations of the higher education and the provisions which are established by the Universities in today's Russia.

The methods of study included the qualitative and quantitative approaches, statistic methods, segmentation, generalization, interpretation.
This study identifies that at the national level the main statutory document defining features of the assessment of competitiveness of universities is the Federal Law on Education in Russian Federation (2012). The Federal Law on Education has incorporated the articles of Bologna process (2002). That process has created the starting conditions for the assessment of the competitiveness of the Russian universities by the international standards because the local training system has accepted the western educational institute training of Bachelor and Master.

The study proves that the unification of the national system of higher education and the transition to a bachelor's and master's degrees have increased competition among the Universities. This conclusion follows from the downward trend in the total number of Russian universities. More than 30 state universities were reorganized and 272 branches of universities were liquidated by order of the Ministry of Education and Science for the period 2012-2015. This is a tendency towards consolidation of Russian universities with the target to improve their competitiveness. The state system of the assessment of competitiveness of Universities has not been implemented yet. Since 2012 authorities are used the indicators, threshold values and criteria on the basis of which the selection of the Universities, having signs of inefficiency is carried out by the Ministry of Education and Science. Feature of the state assessment of competitiveness of Universities is that in fact the efficiency is the sole indicator of its competitiveness.

This study takes a fresh look at Project under the name "5-100”. Purpose of the project is maximizing a competitive position of a group of the leading Russian universities in global educational market. By 2020 at least five Russian universities have to be included in the first hundred leading world-known universities according to world ratings of universities. For Russian universities the join to the first hundred best universities is ambitious target. According to QS World University Rankings(2015) the high positions have such famous Russian Universities as Lomonosov Moscow University (108 rank), Bauman Moscow State Technical University (338 rank), MGIMO University (397 rank).

The findings allow us to identify that such low ranks are the result of the fact that the intra-university evaluation factors are not focused on the indicators that are used by the international experts in the process of the assessment of competitiveness of the Universities.

Universities focus attention on a performance indicator which use state bodies. This indicator differs from the system of the indicators of the international assessment of competitiveness of higher education institution. For achievement of objectives of Project government bodies have to reorganize the system of the assessment of the competitiveness with adaptation of the international indicators.