Higher education in the globalized world: modern trends in management, funding and quality assurance

The article studies the distinction between the approaches to management of educational systems and their funding within two civilizational dimensions - the Western and the Eastern ones. Through the example of specific countries that have provisionally been referred to within the groups which were previously considered to be polarized we have attempted to substantiate the developmental trends of higher education in the contemporary globalized world. The authors refute the traditional perception of both the Western and the Eastern educational models and prove that their transformation has a mirror nature: attributes of one of the models in the contemporary conditions become characteristic of the other. Resulting from these transformations, will there emerge a universal and simultaneously effective system of higher education and will this allow us to solve the problem of harmonizing of the material and the spiritual within the educational dimension in the conditions of the growing dehumanization of society? The authors have provided their view on the solution of the mentioned scope of study within the present article.