Higher education in modern Russia: Progress of globalization or perpetuation of the soviet system (An individual student perspective)

Abstract

Modern higher education rapidly transforms into a global academic network. Russian higher education has undergone considerable change in the last ten years, yet there is hardly a single research presenting the progress of academic reforms from the perspective of an individual student. This article is an attempt to analyze the status of the modern Russian higher education from a student’s perspective.

University admission system in Russia requires for each applicant to pick a precise academic specialization during the enrollment process. Russian higher education responds to the communal request for public vocational training in the professional fields selected by the state. Russian students don’t have any control over curricula and have minimum decision-making about personal academic matters up to the moment of graduation. Russian government keeps the Soviet tradition of controlling all academic matters of each university through the unified regulations in the format of “typical university rules” and a “typical university charter” mandatory for all national higher schools. All graduates of Russian higher educational institutions receive typical state issued qualification diplomas having “professional specialty” written into it, like in the Soviet times. On the other hand, recent reforms in national higher education brought a lot of uncertainty and possibly much more expenses to the Russian college applicants, because of the introduction of tuition in many colleges.

Modern Russian university establishment has an obligation to perform “a production of highly qualified specialists to the nation”, which is identical to the motto of a Soviet higher school. Russian universities are focused on the “proper teaching process”, but not on establishing an encouraging creative study environment. A teacher is a major vehicle of the education progress in Russian higher schools, while a student is just “an object of teaching.”

Soviet component is still overwhelms formal administration of the Russian academia, creating a conflict with modern tendency in global higher education, placing intensity of the student’s involvement into academic and professional decision-making as the key indicator of success.