Reforming government control in the field of higher education as a response to the challenges of the post-pandemic

The proposed study addresses the crucial issue of transforming the system of state control in Russian higher education after the COVID-19 pandemic. We seek to understand how the relationship between the state and educational organizations is changing, paying particular attention to ensuring equal rights and opportunities for private and public universities. Our focus is not only on formal mechanisms for assessing the quality of education but also on their real impact on the lives of students, teachers, and university administrators in the new post-pandemic environment. We consider it critically important to find a balance of interests of all participants in the educational process that would meet the principles of democratic governance of modern education. The need to help universities adapt to the post-pandemic reality while maintaining high quality of education with a reasonable reduction in administrative pressure makes our work particularly relevant. The study applied a comparative legal analysis of the reforms of state control of higher education in 2020-2022, including an assessment of the initial goals and achieved results. The article offers for the first time a holistic view of how the reform of the state control in higher education helps universities adapt to the post-pandemic reality. The results of the work show that the changes made have significantly facilitated the life of educational organizations, freeing them from excessive bureaucracy and administrative obstacles that hindered recovery after the pandemic. We are pleased to note that universities can now focus on really improving the quality of education, rather than on formal compliance with numerous requirements. It is especially important that the new control system takes into account the modern realities of the digital transformation of education and the post-pandemic peculiarities of the work of universities.

state control and supervision, Covid-19, economic recovery, assessment of the quality, higher education, Post-pandemic adaptation, Bureaucracy reduction, State control reform, Industry specifics, Flexible control system