Development Scenarios of Higher Education System in Latvia

The situation in the sphere of higher education has aggravated in 2009 due to the economic crisis, resulting in the initiation of precurses for higher education reform. Several possible development variants were elaborated, and later discussed and analysed within the period of one year. The establishment of one large research university and liquidation of regional higher education institutions was one of the most complicated issues. The research provides a detailed description of the author's proposed development scenarios of higher education system as well as the assessment of these scenarios. The research aim is to determine the most optimum development scenario of higher education system based on the experts' valuation. Publications of Latvian and foreign researchers and report of different ministries as well as statistics were used to achieve the set aim and advanced research tasks. The research is based on generally accepted economic research methods: monographic-descriptive method, method of analysis and synthesis as well as the Analytic Hierarchy Process or AHP method was used to interpret the models and facts. The Analytic Hierarchy Process method indicates that the highest average evaluation was received by the scenario "Regional universities are centres around which regional higher education institutions collaborate and internationalisation takes place". It means that Latvia should develop regional higher education institutions so that they could work in the interests of regional development.