One of the global trends of higher education around the world is its mass character. More and more freshmen with completely different social, economic and academic backgrounds go to universities. In turn, some universities are increasingly competing with each other for the most talented students. According to some researches, especially American ones, the educational systems response to the mass access to higher education with growing selectivity (Winston, 1999). Some other researchers explore the idea that inequality in the types of institutions that students attend also appears greater (Ayalon et al., 2008). Yet some countries do not experience demographic growth, and despite the sharp increase of student body, some universities should even relax their standards to survive. Therewith a student contingent becomes more and more academically heterogeneous.

For instance in Russia the number of both students and universities (state-funded and private) has more than doubled for 20 years. 1991 saw 583,900 students admitted to universities with 360,800 full-time students whereas in 2011 the admission figures stood at 1,06 mln and 604,000 people correspondingly. Yet greater availability of higher education was in discordance with lower demand for academic training – the number of secondary school graduates was on the decrease (from 1,9 mln in 1990 to 1,3 in 2011). Obviously, that increased accessibility of a university degree has resulted in reduced competition. Besides, students with insufficient academic background who did not dream about university just a couple of decades ago have currently a possibility to become at least bachelor degree. The enrollment has become rather heterogeneous in terms of student academic background. The most relevant repercussion of higher academic heterogeneity can be seen in segregating of universities into elite, not elite and really weak. Thus, this paper explores the distribution of Russia’s universities by their selectivity (and heterogeneity) across specific fields of study, especially within medical and engineering groups of majors.

Heterogeneity in the sphere of education has been rather extensively studied from different points of view: in terms of differences in family background (Woessmann, 2004, Brian, 2010); in in ethnicity and race (Baker at all, 2000; Altschulet al, 2006) and finally in academic abilities (De Paola, Scoppa, 2010; Bielinska-Kwapisz and Brown, 2012). These studies mainly refer to mathematical statistics by measuring heterogeneity (standard deviation, range, variance etc.). And they do not consider heterogeneity in terms of system. In economics the attempts to formalize a systemic heterogeneity are mainly concerned to the evaluation of income inequality by the well-known Gini coefficient (Sudhir, Segal, 2008; Bosi, Seegmuller, 2006) or similar indices (Becker et al., 2005). But all these studies have some limitations and cannot be used to properly and comprehensively evaluate the heterogeneity of educational system as a whole. That is why we introduce a new method of estimating heterogeneity. To do this we propose a mathematical model based on the construction of universities’ interval order. Then we use the Unified State Examination (USE) scores of Russian students to illustrate how our measure of system’s heterogeneity works. (It should be also noted, that currently USE is the only source of information concerning the level of students’ knowledge after school graduation and their readiness for learning at university).

The methodology we propose could be used for assessing the educational systems in other countries, which also face demographical problems and social challenges.

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