Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 1 | A Bright Future: Russian Higher Education, page 3 (low bandwidth)

At the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, a postgraduate school opened in 1995 and offering a joint degree with the University of Manchester in Great Britain, rector Teodor Shanin answers a question about the shortcomings of modern Russian education with a tour of the library. Orderly, easily accessible shelves line a hall full of students typing away at individual computer work stations. It looks like a small, high-tech American public library. This is not the norm in Russia, where getting a library book is perhaps the best reenactment of the Soviet shopping experience. First you stand in line to place your order, then you wait for your book. Russian university libraries do not have open stacks. There is no looking, no touching, no wandering around for inspiration.

“This is the only library in Moscow with open shelves categorized by subject,” says Shanin. “I feel terrible when some of the best scholars in Moscow come and beg for one hour in my library.”

That’s not to say that Shanin hasn’t found some very good traditions to build on in the Russian educational system. He has, for instance, adopted cross-disciplinary “philosophical readings” from pre-revolutionary Russian universities, at which students engage in no-holds-barred intellectual debate. “This is a very modern idea, but Russians came up with it first,” he explains. “It’s like teach-ins in the 1960s. They are a part of Russian academic culture.”

Shanin’s school has 200 students from across the former Soviet Union. His educational goal, he says, is to help “create a flame” that spreads innovative approaches to teaching and learning. Students from the outlying regions are sponsored by the Open Society Institute’s Higher Education Support Program. The school has five faculties ranging from social work to law. For all faculties but the faculty of law, the tuition for Muscovites is about $2,000 per year. At the faculty of law, it’s $3,500.

For a time in the first half of the 1990s, the period of economic shock therapy and hyperinflation, making money was more popular than making the grade at top universities. The idea of shelling out for a school like Shanin’s would have been dismissed as highly impractical. Even at Moscow State University, the Harvard, Yale and Princeton of Russia all rolled into one and topped with a Stalin-era spire visible from across town, the number of applicants in some departments dropped by two-thirds from the early 1990s.

The low point was probably the desperate time following the crash of the ruble in 1998. When that crisis struck, most students were receiving a stipend of about 83 rubles, which was worth about $13.30. After the ruble collapsed, the value of the stipend shrunk to about $3.90, barely enough for several spartan meals or a couple of Big Macs at Moscow’s McDonald’s.

Today, most students receive a stipend of 200 rubles, or about $7; not much of an improvement, but other numbers indicate an upturn. Russian industry is showing signs of growth and the service sector is continuing to develop. Well-trained managers and technical specialists are in demand. According to the Ministry of Education, in 1999 there were 1.3 million high school graduates. In the fall of that year, over 1 million students enrolled in higher education institutions. While some may have been graduates from previous years, that’s still an astonishingly high figure.

Tatiana Klyachko, an economist at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, founded in 1992, attributes at least part of the boom to young men looking for cover from military service, especially after the first Chechen war began in 1994. But most still find it heartening.

“The situation now is much better than it was a few years ago,” says Ivan Groznov, dean of the department of molecular and biological physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, which has a rigorous six-year program. “Now I am optimistic,” says Groznov. “Students have started to have a serious attitude about education. They want not just a diploma, but an education.”

That, of course, does not preclude making money. At the prestigious Moscow State Institute of Foreign Relations (MGIMO), where a law education costs $7,000 a year, students stride purposefully through the halls wearing suits and ties and carrying briefcases. Political science department dean Andrei Melville says that what used to be known as the “training ground of cadre” for the Foreign Ministry is now “more like the training ground of Russian yuppies” who prefer high paying corporate jobs to the small salaries of diplomats.

There are other signs that the forces of capitalism are beginning to affect Russian higher education. University applicants no longer need to make the grade of 5 (or A) on entrance exams to top schools. A, B or C can be remedied by a tuition fee. Two or three thousand dollars may seem cheap to American parents facing the prospect of financing an Ivy League education, but it is more than two year’s salary for the average Russian, which makes Harvard look like a bargain.

With education spending budgeted at just 3.2 percent of Russia’s GDP, state schools are always short of money. Many have opened affiliates throughout their home regions and in neighboring regions where students are required to pay fees. And the number of non-state higher education institutions jumped from 78 to 349 between 1993 and the present. Built on the new business-oriented economy, such schools draw students with the promise of degrees in advertising, management, tourism and other specialties not always offered by classical state universities.

Some of these institutions, though, fail to meet state standards or obtain state accreditation. Tuition of hundreds, even thousands of dollars, means that few Russian students can afford such freedom of choice. Well under 10 percent study at “commercial” institutions. Both at state and commercial institutions, the number of students studying subjects related to economics, finance and law has caused a glut of such specialists on the job market. One-third of students this year graduated with degrees in these fields.

By any measure, the flow of students may soon run dry, not because of lack of interest in higher education but because of a lack of student bodies. Russia’s predicted demographic bust may mean that soon there simply will not be enough students to go around. Education Minister Vladimir Filippov sounded the warning at a convocation of education workers held in Moscow last January. According to Filippov—and bearing in mind that recent population growth estimates for the Russian Federation are

-0.07 percent—by the year 2009 there will be only 1.3 million high-school graduates to fill 1.7 state-funded spots in higher education institutions.

Teachers are feeling the pinch, too. When the Soviet Union was intact, university professors lived fairly well, with decent salaries and apartments. Academicians were like gods, with vast dachas and chauffeured cars. Today, there is more freedom, but there are fewer perks. Salaries no longer support a satisfactory standard of living and this financial shortfall encourages a system of tutoring that may be even more insidious than SAT prepping in the United States.

In Moscow, some university professors earn up to $50 an hour tutoring high school students for entrance exams; not bad when the average salary is little more than $50 per month. In a country where getting into the right school can depend on having the right tutor, it is not unusual for a well-to-do family to spend several thousand dollars in this manner. A standardized university entrance exam has been written, but has not been greeted enthusiastically since it would eliminate a system from which many have profited. Professors also supplement their income by doing double duty, often at a rival school. At some commercial institutions, most of the faculty is made up of professors moonlighting from low-paying jobs at state schools.

Next page: There are at least 40 NGU alumni at Microsoft and an equal number in Silicon Valley.

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