A. Melikyan, Specialist of the Faculty of Management, Lecturer of the Faculty of Business Informatics, Doctoral student of the Faculty of Management, State University - Higher School of Economics

The results of four-year OECD project “Thematic review of tertiary education”, in which took part 24 countries, including the Russian Federation, were published on September 2008. The outcome of the project was publication of the review “Tertiary Education for the Knowledge Society” which represents a full-scale and combined research of the key tendencies and directions of tertiary education policy in the member and partner countries of OECD. The publication of the project’s results is per se “international encyclopedia of tertiary education”, because it covers all the fundamental directions of the tertiary education policy and summarizes the experience of countries which have not only different levels of socio-economic development, but also different approaches to educational policy. The particular interest for specialists responsible for elaboration and realization of educational policy, represent the practical recommendations, worked out by OECD experts on the basis of conducted comparative international research and revelation of the most successful political practices, which permit countries to respond effectively to the contemporary challenges faced by their educational systems.

In the same time, while representing the project’s results, the OECD experts emphasize, that the use of the entire set of proposed recommendations as well as the specific instruments of their realization on the national level, requires the careful analysis and discussion with the involvement of different stakeholders: national and regional government authorities, quality assurance agencies, TEIs, employers and students associations, - taking into account the features of national context, traditions and peculiarities of country’s education system development.

The analysis of priorities and national case-studies of OECD countries’ educational policy and the estimation of possibilities of their usage for Russian education development was one of the main objectives of the project «Analytical review of the OECD member states education policy and analysis of the Education policy committee strategic priorities to respond to the Roadmap for the Russian Federation accession to the OECD Convention requirements», realized by International Organizations Research Institute in 2008 by request of the Federal Agency of Education.

We present to our readers first analytical article form the series of materials, prepared in the framework of the Project on the basis of the OECD project results analysis. It is no coincidence that this article is devoted to the theme of educational quality, as far as the educational quality assurance, including tertiary education, on different levels (international, national, institutional) today becomes one of the main directions of the current analytical work of OECD Directorate on Education, which is conditioned by the growing scale and diversification of higher education systems and increasing concurrence on the educational services market. In the published material is also presented the estimation of the possibilities to use the OECD recommendations on the tertiary education quality assurance for the development of education in the Russian Federation.