Social/Economic Preconditions and Prospects for the Development of Education Insurance in Russia

Over recent years, amid the world economic recession, the issue of funding education has become a major concern for many nations throughout the globe. A crucial trend that has been observed of late is rising costs of education against a background of declines in the number of state-financed openings. In Russia, this has been accompanied by declines in demand for paid educational services on the part of business and private individuals. The lack of funding has, in turn, given rise to a number of other issues, including the sub-par quality of much of today’s education. Today, many institutions of higher learning are reporting poor preparation levels among high school graduates, while employers are getting increasingly concerned about those among college graduates. There has been a considerable amount of research into financial instruments covering the various educational risks. Conversely, education insurance has, for the most part, been confined to a secondary role. In this paper, the author examines some of the latest theoretical approaches to construing the essence of education insurance, fine-tunes its semantic definition, proposes a special classification structure for it, and provides a rationale for its role in the development of the financial mechanism underpinning the sphere of education. An attempt is made to come up with the optimum model for education insurance by reference to present-day Russian reality. Further, the author views the prospects for the development of education insurance, above all, from the perspective of improvements in the quality of educational activity.