Klaipėdos universitetas

Author analyzed the ways of overcoming the negative tendency to the degradation of the human capital in the provincial regions of Russia and other countries of the Eastern Europe. It’s shown that the important role in the processes of solving the problem should be played by the technical universities, situated in the small towns of the region. The development of the universities should be carried on according to the specific strategy, which’s goal is a training of the qualified specialists, and to take as the students the local young people, which are going to live and get a job in the region in future. There are also presented a set of requirements for this kind of the strategy, which are based on the idea of the institutional projecting of the University Technopolis.

The development of higher education is amongst topical issues. The modern society realizes that the most valuable capital is a humanbeing with his/her intellectual potential and this has become the main resource for social and economic development. Over thelast decade, all developed countries have introduced national education system reforms, which have received significant financialsupport. National development strategies attempt to focus on the development of adequate education system supported by state policiesbecause it is becoming more and more evident that the quality of education determines further development of a country. Thedevelopment of a strategy for the sustainable development must presuppose the identification of the mission and aims for short-termand long-term activities. The purpose for this article is to analyse the main trends of higher education in Latvia in order to identifythe mission and strategy for sustainable development of higher education institutions in Latvia. There were applied such researchmethods as analysis and synthesis of scientific literature, normative acts and documents that regulate the development of highereducation in Latvia and EU, methods of grouping, comparisons, classification, summarizing, description and prediction.

Study programme quality assessment provides higher education quality which in its turn is an essential precondition for the successful national economy development. At the moment the society has a lot of discussion about what is higher education quality and how to assess it. The pragmatic approach makes us set criteria for study programme quality assessment. However, before doing that one must understand what higher education quality is. Developing over the years, higher education has created different quality understandings. The different quality understandings form the necessity of different quality assessment approaches. As the foundation of higher education quality assessment to create the methodological basis there are taken higher education quality assessment conceptions distinguished by R. Barnett: objective, subjective and development. Each of the conceptions intends to use different approaches for higher education assessment. The research approbates the usage of The Analytic Hierarchy process (AHP) method to detect the most significant study programme quality criteria and the most suitable way of assessment for them. AHP method is based on expert surveys, which were taken part by two most important interest groups interested in higher education: higher education administrative staff and students. Higher education administrators are represented by Higher Education Council representative, LU heads of administrative departments and leadership staff who are responsible for study quality and programme accreditation. In their turn, students are represented by members of Latvian Student Association, LU student council representatives and students from different LU faculties.