Problems of higher school: inside and outside the education system

The quality of higher education, its ability to fulfill its function of providing the economy with the necessary personnel, has long been criticized. An additional impetus to the search for the causes of this trouble was given by the situation that developed after February 2022. At the same time, at the official level and in the media, the transition of Russian universities to the two-stage model prescribed by the Bologna system was cited as a key reason. The article is based on the author's longterm observation of the work of higher education, as well as the results of numerous empirical studies conducted in the 2000s - 2010s on the process and consequences of reforming all levels of the education system from preschool to graduate school and in general budgetary organizations of the social sphere, as well as the labor mobility of university graduates; staffing of priority industries and science, it is shown that the set of reasons leading to a decrease in the quality of higher education is much wider, and many of them are outside the education system itself. The analysis of the orientation of the educational legislation, the persistence in carrying out relevant reforms, the scarcity of education funding suggests that this was a conscious process implemented in accordance with neoliberal dogmas about minimizing social expenditures of the state and commercialization of the social sphere. There was practically no active industrial policy, as a result of which the structure of the economy degraded, and high-tech industries, due to the low level of profitability and a short planning horizon, became unable to play the role of a key link in the “production- science-education” triangle. Accordingly, improving the quality of higher education requires, firstly, the rejection of neoliberal approaches to financing and organizing the work of all levels of the education system (since it has an “accumulative effect”), and, secondly, the creation