Government moves to raise quality of higher education

The Russian government has officially announced details of a reform of the national system of state control for the quality of higher education, according to recent statements of senior state officials and heads of Russia’s leading universities.

The details of the reform were agreed during a meeting between Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova and the heads of leading universities in Moscow earlier this month.

At the meeting it was decided that it would be better to combine the existing licensing and accreditation procedures applied to domestic universities as well as to create special commissions that will focus on the verification of educational programmes at Russian universities.

According to Golikova, execution of the reform is an acute need due to numerous claims and complaints registered in recent years about the work of experts of the Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Education and Science (Rosobrnadzor) – the state agency currently responsible for controlling the quality of higher education in Russia.

Golikova told university leaders: “Currently we are experiencing a lack of qualitative assessments of the quality of higher education offered by Russian universities.”

According to Golikova, by combining licensing and accreditation procedures, it will be possible to cut the existing bureaucratic procedures significantly and to make the current system of assessing the quality of higher education more efficient and less expensive for the state budget.

During the meeting the sides also agreed other details of the reform.

Both Golikova and university presidents supported further annual state monitoring of Russian universities by the experts of the Russian Ministry of Education and Science.

In addition, the sides agreed to maintain the currently implemented practice of "independent assessments of the results of higher education in Russia”, which is carried out by Rosobrnadzor and certain federal teaching and methodological associations in Russia.

With regard to the aforementioned commissions, both state experts and representatives of the university community believe the creation of these commissions is important for the examination of educational programmes at Russian universities.

It is expected that these commissions will be formed from the representatives of leading universities in a particular field, depending on the specialisation of a university, along with leading employers from the same field.

During the examination of Russia’s leading universities, these commissions will include international experts. At the same time a university will be automatically exempted from assessments of the quality of its educational programmes if it is ranked in certain global university rankings, including the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, QS World University Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universities or Shanghai Ranking.

Public discussion

The public discussion about revising approaches to control activities of universities in Russia began after the European University at St Petersburg was not licensed for conducting educational activities in 2017.

In May of this year, Rosobrnadzor terminated an accreditation of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences.

This forced the Association of Leading Universities of Russia and the Association of Global Universities, which includes the 50 largest universities in the Russian Federation, to appeal to President Vladimir Putin to reform the current system of accreditation of universities.

In the meantime, the proposed reform has already been criticised by representatives of some Russian universities.

According to Yuri Popov, deputy head of Voronezh Economics University, the introduction of the proposed accreditation procedure "will guarantee an increase in the burden on leading universities" and a decrease in the quality of expertise, since "universities will nominate those experts in those assessments who are less involved in teaching and research", and therefore are less knowledgeable in this field, for instance, administrators.