“Optimizing” Higher Education in Russia. David Mandel

talking about simple things, and these young people quickly pulled out their notebooks to take notes. So there was some desire to learn. But they lacked a foundation. I had the impression that they had been completely deprived of knowledge. This was the middle 1990s.”

When the Soviet Union came to an end in a “revolution from above,” university teachers, as practically all the rest of Russian society, lacked traditions and experience of independent organization to defend their interests. The newly acquired freedom and opportunities to participate in university governance fell into their hands without struggle. And at once teachers were thrust into a struggle for physical survival, a condition completely unfamiliar to Soviet citizens. Indeed, an unstated goal of “shock therapy” was in that way to prevent significant popular resistance.20 And it succeeded well in the case of university teachers. As for the Trade Union of Employees of Education and Science, a corporatist organization inherited from the Soviet Union, it continued to rubber stamp the decisions of government and university authorities.

c. 2000-2012: Return of the State

      The first decade of the new millennium began with the election of Vladimir Putin to the presidency of Russia. He was Yeltsin’s handpicked successor, a man who, among other things, could be relied upon to protect Yeltsin and his “family” from prosecution.

      That decade saw the state’s return to an active role in educational policy, made possible by the economy’s emergence from its lengthy depression. There followed a decade of rapid economic growth, thanks in large part to a steep and prolonged rise in the price of oil, which eventually tripled. The recovery also benefitted from the dramatic fall of the ruble in 1998 (a devaluation that the IMF had consistently opposed) that cut imports in half, strongly boosting domestic production.

The state’s budget for education increased substantially from the desperately low levels of the 1990s, doubling by 2004 and growing even faster in subsequent years. As a percent of GDP in constant rubles, federal spending on higher education rose from 0.3% to 0.7% in 2000-2004 and another 140% in 2004-09%.21 Total expenditure from both public and private sources at all levels of education increased from 2.9% of GDP to 4.6% between 2000 and 2011. But even so, state spending on education was the fourth lowest among OECD members, well below the average of 6.1%.22

During his first electoral campaign, Putin did not present anything resembling an economic programme. But the appointment of German Gref, author of the “Gref Plan,” as Minister of Economic Development and Trade foretold a strongly neoliberal social policy. In higher education, the government contemplated replacing direct state funding based on itemized budgets with vouchers that would be distributed to students on the basis of their scores in unified high-school finishing exams. As consumers of educational services, students would use their vouchers to apply to universities, forcing the latter to compete for these clients. But experiments with this programme drew criticism from virtually all quarters, not least rectors, and were abandoned in 2005, although unified state high-school finishing exams were generalized in 2009.23 That innovation reduced the widespread corruption that had surrounded university admissions and broadened choice for high-school graduates. But the negative impact of the reform on the quality of high-school education, whose final two years were geared to the state exams, continues to be decried by educators, as is the shift in pedagogical emphasis from instilling knowledge to prioritizing the acquisition of “competences.”

Although the voucher system was abandoned, the neoliberal orientation in higher-education policy became increasingly pronounced in Putin’s second four-year term. University funding was largely based on the number of state-supported students enrolled. The Federal Programme for the Development of Education of 2005 clearly designated the labour market as the leading driver of educational policy, an orientation that only grew stronger over time. The promotion of personal and social development barely received mention. The sought-after “national idea” for post-Soviet Russia had at last apparently been found: international competitiveness. That document also introduced the term “optimization,” a goal whose application in the social sphere would have a major negative impact on the condition of university teachers in the following decade. 24

The Minister of Education from 2004 to 2012 was Andrei Fursenko, a personal acquaintance of Putin from his native St. Petersburg. Fursenko was a physicist who had turned to business after the Soviet Union and then entered government service. At a pro-government youth forum in 2007, he criticized the inertness of the educational system inherited from the Soviet past, which he was intent on transforming. That system, he opined, had stubbornly tried to make young people into creators; whereas the main goal of education should be to cultivate consumers who know how to make use of technologies and innovations developed by others.25

One of the reforms of this period was the designation of élite national research universities that received additional funding, part of the effort to promote basic research in universities and “international competitiveness.” Another programme introduced in the late 2000s and also aimed at diversification through the creation of an élite university sector was the formation of “federal universities” in Russia’s various regions. This involved the forced merger of hitherto separate, often very different, institutions, a process experienced very painfully by many teachers, who, in typical fashion, were not consulted. Along with the Moscow and St. Petersburg State Universities, that received a unique status in 2009, the élite tier eventually comprised some 60 institutions, about 12% of the public universities.26

The advancement of Russian universities in the “international educational marketplace” became an important goal of government policy. To that end, the government signed onto the Bologna process in 2003, leading to the replacement of the traditional five-year first degree with a four-year BA, that could be followed by a two-year MA course. The higher candidate’s degree (kandidatskaya—roughly a PhD) was, however, retained, along with the highest academic degree of Doctor. The avowed aim of this reform was to facilitate the international mobility of students and faculty. But it continues to arouse much criticism among university teachers, who complain that the resulting bachelor’s programme is merely a truncated version of the former five-year course of study that does not provide an adequate general higher education. Among other things, the bachelor’s programme is supposed to include a considerable amount of individualized student work, but the classroom teaching load of university teacher leaves them little time for individual student supervision.27

With increased state funding for higher education, teachers’ salaries improved in the second half of the decade but remained well below the average wage in many of Russia’s regions. An international comparison found that average salaries of Russian university teachers in 2008/09 were equal to only 60% of per capita GDP, far below the level of their counterparts in the vast majority of developed, and even poorer, countries.28 “Salaries really did rise between 2001 and 2011, roughly speaking from 10,000 to 30,000 rubles,” observed mathematics teachers R. Karasev of MFTI. But that still remained far from the amount needed to feed a family.”29

      To make matters worse, in 2008 the old centrally-fixed wage scale for public-sector employees was replaced with a New System for the Remuneration of Work. This gave heads of hospitals, schools, and universities broader latitude in spending their allotted budgets. Money that they economized on designated functions could be used as incentives to stimulate the work of employees. How that was done was supposed to be negotiated with the employees. But in the absence independent