At the core of the “elite education philosophy” is the idea of “selectivity” formed in the course of historical development. The criterion of “philosophy of selectivity” was defined by Plato in the IV century BC and reads as follows: “Philosophy is not inherent in the crowd” (State, 494 a). In the XX century, N.A. Berdyaev, while developing this tradition, in his book “The Kingdom of Spirituality and the Kingdom of the Stubborn’, touched upon the problem of the philosophy of choice and wrote: There are two kinds of philosophy - the philosophy of values and the philosophy of profit. Value means quality, and in practice the philosophy of quantity prevails. This article discusses this.