In the USSR, higher education was focused on the training of narrow specialists who had mastered a particular set of professional knowledge in one field. In post-Soviet Russia, however, universities are not able to train people with the qualification demanded by the labor market. To overcome this problem, a closer connection between businesses and universities is needed, but data from research on the Irkutsk region show that the percentage of employers engaged in active cooperation with institutions of higher learning is low. Since Russian universities are interested in cooperating with employers, they will have to take the initiative in the development of existing forms of interaction and the search for new ones. (Contains 2 tables.)