RUSSIA: European-style model for higher education

Russia has taken a major step toward the introduction of European-style higher education with the approval of a controversial parliamentary bill backing a two-tier system of bachelors and masters degrees.

The bill was initially rejected on a technicality when not enough members of Russia’s upper house, the Federation Council, voted for it. But it was passed after the speaker, Kremlin-loyalist Sergei Mironov, urged a rethink and it will become law when President Vladimir Putin signs it.

Passage of the bill will bring Russia into line with the European Union’s Bologna process that aims to harmonise university degrees across the continent. But the decision has met unprecedented opposition from many within Russia’s notoriously conservative state university sector.

Key academic issues include retaining the traditional five-year diplomas for courses such as the arts, humanities and medicine, and allowing top institutions to set their own entrance examinations. But critics say these have long been little more than corrupt schemes designed to help lever bribes from the parents of would-be students.

A new combined school leaving and university entrance examination, the Unified State Examination or USE, consists of a series of independently marked and verified standardised written tests. The USE has undergone trials in recent years and is due to be introduced nationally next year.

Concessions agreed between Education Minister Andrei Fursenko and the Russian Union of Rectors mean universities will be bound to accept USE results although they will retain the right to demand additional testing if students fail to come up to scratch.

Moscow State University rector and union president, Viktor Sadovnichy, has been among the most vociferous opponents of two-tier higher education. Sadovnichy declined to comment following the vote but Lena Lenskaya, assistant director of education at the British Council in Moscow, said the bill’s adoption was not the end of the story.

“I am glad the decision has been taken, although it is still far from being a resolved issue,” said Lenskaya, a former deputy minister in Russia’s education ministry. “The bill makes room for a range of exceptions for courses that include the arts and medical professions, for example. There are still more questions than answers.”

She said that that Russian students and members of the public – as well as many academics – remained distrustful of a system they did not understand and were unsure it would help graduates with future careers or further study in Europe.

Russia’s long tradition of setting input standards for higher education rather than output standards remains a key stumbling block to harmonising with European university values.

Yelena Kashina, a spokeswoman for Moscow’s Russian State Social University, the country’s biggest, welcomed the prospect of wider support for two-tier degrees. The university, founded in 1991, teaches 100,000 students in 12 different faculties.

Kashina said that although most students still followed traditional five-year diplomas, bachelors and masters degrees were available in courses that included sociology, social work, psychology, ecology, mathematics, economics and informatics.