Skylane 182/RG Turbo Skylane/RG
Flight Crew Commercial; Flight Crew Flight Instructor; Flight Crew Multiengine; Flight Crew Instrument
Flight Crew Last 90 Days 140; Flight Crew Total 1800; Flight Crew Type 60
Communication Breakdown
ATC Issue All Types; Conflict NMAC; Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Published Material / Policy
Flight Crew Requested ATC Assistance / Clarification; Flight Crew Took Evasive Action
Airspace Structure; Procedure
Near miss occurred while in IMC on an IFR flight plan. [I] was conducting training with student student flying and CFI monitoring. ATC Center advised traffic; replied 'Negative contact in IMC' center asked if we had him on TCAS; replied yes.  Asked if we wanted left or right; center gave us vectors for traffic acknowledged and complied with vectors.  At this point the vectors put us into conflict with traffic  coming in and out of the cloud bank glimpsed traffic very close less than 50 feet horizontal and vertical in between clouds on a collision course approx 10/11 o clock off the nose. Took aircraft from student and extreme evasive action was taken to avoid a collision.  Controller gave some sort of statement after the accident about sorry about that; those vectors put you on a collision.  Contributing factors ATC's failure to maintain separation of IFR aircraft in IMC from radar targets; second aircraft failure to maintain VFR.
C182 Flight Instructor reported ATC issuing a vector into traffic resulted in pilot taking extreme collision avoidance maneuver.