The paper analyzes the results of an empirical socio-economic study of higher education (focused on engineering education) conducted in 2008. This research is part of the larger international comparative study of the quality of engineering education in the BRIC countries (the title of the international study is “Higher Education in the Global Knowledge Economy”) headed by Prof. Martin Carnoy (Stanford University, USA) with the participation of research teams from India and China. The key idea of the study as a whole is to analyze changes in higher education, associated also with the shift from planned to the market economy and with the shift from an economy based on natural resources and cheap labour to a knowledge-based economy. Central questions of the research to be presented is the meaning of the quality (and the purpose) of engineering education. Is there a clear understanding of it shared by all the stakeholders? This brings us to a more general question: who is actually the customer? who defines and is to define the curriculum – the state? employers? students? Related to this: why do engineering universities open certain specializations and close other ones? How do they select teaching methods and approaches? What is a success of an educational programme in engineering? How is it related to a success or failure of the corresponding industry? Conceptual framework of the research is based partially on the concept of cultural capital developed by Pierre Bourdieu. By analyzing different views of students, professors, university administrators, and employers on the education process and organization we can identify the differences in their perception of the cultural capital created by these institutions. These differences could explain incentives for changes of these universities.

The methodology, combines qualitative and quantitative sociological analysis. In a sample of cities, we choose universities with engineering departments and explore opinions of the following groups: - administrative staff (responsible for academic curriculum, R&D activities – rectors, vice-rectors, deans) – 4-8 expert semiformal interviews per university; - employers – 30-40 expert semiformal interviews per city; - students finishing their BA or MA degree – a formal questionnaire, 2500 respondents (600-800 students per city); - recent graduates – a formal questionnaire, 2000 respondents (400-600 students per city). In Russia, 4 cities are taken: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Perm, and Tomsk. In Tomsk, the field research was conducted in November 2008, in the other three cities it is conducted in January-February 2009.

Preliminary results (obtained from the city of Tomsk case) reveal noticeable gaps in how the stakeholders assess the engineering education they have dealt with. The main discrepancy consists in the very understanding of the output: administrators claim / believe to have equipped students with convertible, flexible knowledge and skills (according to them, graduates are well integrated into research activities, have a good command of foreign languages – and thus are able to participate in the international labor market); employers complain of poor practical skills of recent graduates; while students and graduates argue to have had little practice and poor research experience, to have deteriorated their foreign language proficiency during their studies. Some of these findings are similar for other countries participating in the comparative study.These opinions, roughly generalized here, have to be examined in detail and checked for consistency before any conclusions can be drawn.