The investment climate in Russia has improved somewhat lately. Unfortunately, we cannot talk about serious progress that would lead to the implementation of truly breakthrough projects, but, nevertheless, things got off the ground. If 12-15 years ago the investment background in the Russian Federation seemed extremely negative, today there are positive shifts. However, for the development of the investment attractiveness of our country, there are significant obstacles that must be overcome.
One such problem: the educational gap. Today in Russia, the majority of schoolchildren who have received a secondary (complete) general education apply to study in higher educational institutions. At the same time, the strangest thing is that most of those who applied to universities enter these universities. This situation of total "enrollment" in universities is associated with a demographic problem. Naturally, there is still a lot of competition in prestigious universities today, but universities, shall we say, of the middle class experience a significant shortage of applicants, and therefore they are ready to accept literally everyone - and even those whose USE results leave much to be desired.
In this regard, a serious imbalance is born in the country, when the educational system annually graduates a large number of specialists with a university diploma. The fertility pit of the mid-to-late 1990s manifests itself in full, which does not give educational institutions any room for maneuver. After the reform of education, when the Ministry of Education and Science literally makes all those whose knowledge and skills are literally at the zero level due to ignorance of the educational process, a situation has developed with the pseudo-quality of Russian education. By pseudo-quality it should be understood that diplomas, in the end, will be received by the overwhelming majority of applicants, since the practice of deductions can seriously hit the budget of the school, technical school, university. This puts the heads of educational institutions in Russia in a very strict framework, when they have to close their eyes to the pedagogical credo and the system of evaluating, drawing out in diplomas those grades that many graduate students simply do not deserve. But if you do not draw at least the notorious "satisfactory", then you can incite the wrath of the inspection commission, which will declare that the educational institution simply did not cope with the task assigned to it. None of the directors and rectors wants to get a hat, and therefore we have a tremendous increase in the "quality" (read, pseudo-quality) of education in recent years.
Naturally, students are well aware that they are the very sacred cows on which a priori the hand of the leadership of the educational institution cannot rise in terms of their expulsion. So it turns out that today, according to the most conservative estimates, about 10-15% of university students do not receive an education, but are simply enrolled in their higher schools. And who will the state get at the exit? And it will receive such certified specialists, from whose services it would be better to immediately refuse before the implementation of their first project. Moreover, even among those who really gnawed the granite of science, a few will begin their professional activities in the profession that is indicated in their diploma.
It turns out that huge amounts of budget financing go down the drain. The state, striving for attracting investments in various spheres of activity and the development of domestic production, itself is following the slippery path of the irrationality of the educational system.
Literally every day from the TV screens, we hear calls from government officials for business to follow the Western path and participate in financing education. But business remains largely deaf to such calls, because today it is much more profitable for many business representatives to hire a person who has come to be called a guest worker, rather than investing in home-grown personnel. In recent years, business has learned to count pennies, and therefore it is much more profitable to hire labor "partners" from Tajikistan, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, China and other countries to implement production projects. Not only do these workers already have some experience in the relevant activities, they can also save social benefits, "forget" about paying taxes, and in general, you can enter into a corruption conspiracy with the Federal Migration Service, in order to one fine moment declare about illegal immigrants in a certain territory. Such cases, when a business owner simply “hand over” his workers, engaged in illegal labor, to representatives of the Federal Migration Service, so that later they simply do not pay the due wages. A move that is well known to the prosecutor's office, but for some reason is still practiced at numerous industrial and, especially, construction sites.
A business that is placed in a rather complex framework, which is akin to the framework of survival, is completely unprofitable to finance professional training. A metalworking enterprise today does not need a worker who, as it is fashionable to say in the educational sphere, is comprehensively developed. Business today does not need thinking people at all. The main task of Russian business, which is forced to balance between the principles of economic well-being and government intervention, is to obtain personnel trained by someone who will, in the mode of silent and obedient robots, carry out their duties, making a profit. At the same time, a banal dismissal awaits those who are dissatisfied and overly “understanding” without any regard for the obligations regulated by the Labor Code.
In this case, there is a difficult-to-resolve contradiction: the state wants to get specialists in any industry with different levels of education, but at the same time differing in all-round development, but business structures are only concerned with labor competencies. It turns out that the state finances educational institutions from the budget, and Russian businessmen are in no hurry to use the services of graduates of these educational institutions. What kind of talk is there about financing not from budget sources?..
Today, in our country, a few enterprises are ready to finance educational projects, providing students with the educational program that was developed jointly by the management of the enterprise and the administration of the educational institution.
Russian education today could give a significant impetus to the production sphere, as well as contribute to an increase in the positiveness of the investment climate in the country, if they stopped making a kind of "push-pull" out of it, one head of which is directed back, and the other - on the advanced principles of interaction spheres of business. Another question is to what extent today the state has the right to interfere in the interests of business … Is it able to find ways to solve this complex problem, or will everything be left to chance again?..
But if we leave this problem unresolved, then soon it will be possible to get a version of the final isolation of the education system from the real economic needs of the country. And then we will get a country of graduates, workers and other graduates of educational institutions, the demand for which is zero.
