Institution of education was formed as the means for solution of different social tasks and always depended on external conditions and other fundamental sectors like production, politics, law, science. However, nowadays progressive autonomy of social institutions of economy and education has been detected.

On the one hand, in modern society education plays a role of important stratification sieve, fundamental prerequisite of upward mobility and sets the goal of forming new personality type. On the other hand, education contributes to keeping and deepening of social inequality which is itself considered to be the display of the different group conflicts. For instance, some American scientists suppose that expansion of the education system in USA is due to struggles of different status groups for wealth, power and prestige and not due to need of well-qualified specialists. A variety of thesis about the education's loss of humanistic function and becoming the mechanism of state violence and manipulation with social consciousness appeared during the last decades. The educational process is announced to lose its role of controlling the quality of skills and abilities, competence and proficiency whereas all these factors now are corrected and evaluated by labor market, partners, colleagues, family and friends.

The general problem of all national education systems is the following. Information flows have risen dramatically in man-made society. The human opportunities to absorb information and degree of necessity to keep all spheres of human activity up-to-date have collided. The attempts to keep up with new processes of cultural, social and scientific life having an old-fashioned 19^th century structure resulted in crucial disorientation in activity of institution of education. It is not able to react to needs of labor market, especially in technical education.

Institution of education is a very complicated organism with peculiar position in society. In Russian situation peculiarity of its position was aggravated by changes which took place while the society was not ready for them.

The realization of state plans was followed by orientation of the system of education on requirements of educational services users. This situation is partially forced as most links of education system were lost without state financial support. In order to receive this support among direct services users, education system started to offer new popular directions, interesting for them. Even universities with absolutely different profile started to give education of lawyers, economists, managers etc., which affected the quality of education and professional responsibility of the teaching stuff. As a result, the conflict between youth's aspirations and structured system of education became milder although, on the other hand, the problems of placement and excess of specialists in some sectors worsened. That is to display discrepancy of structure of education system and real staffing requirements of the national economy.

Moreover, the employers, and particularly the Russian ones, are not interested in undertaking concerted efforts for education of the specialists and integrating the youth in labor market. Thus, the connections between national economy and education system, enterprises and universities are even more detached than before.

Most of these problems are likely to be solved with the initiation of the two-level system of higher education (bachelor\master). This innovation is supposed to decrease the number of retraining students with the loss of previous years of studies, to help future graduates become more demanded in labor market with needs in different levels of qualification, and to make the choice of the master major more responsible and mature.

In conclusion we would like to emphasize that the problems and the prospects of Russian system of education require consideration from both economical and sociocultural points of view.