Official website of the President of Russia

Transcripts   /

President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev: Good afternoon, colleagues.

It is a great pleasure to address this congress. Thank you for the invitation. On your agenda is a very important matter: a strategy for developing higher education. Of course, you will also be discussing the various problems affecting higher education establishments and their work today, especially in the current economic situation.

I know that the members of the Union of Rectors have reacted attentively to my recent initiatives for supporting students in Russia. I hope that we will be able to discuss these initiatives too, and I hope for further constructive work during this difficult period for higher education, and for the country as a whole.

Six weeks ago, I issued a number of instructions on support for the higher professional education system, Russia’s students, and employment for higher education graduates. One of these initiatives involved giving fee-paying students with good academic results the chance to transfer to the budget-funded quota of students.

In accordance with my instruction, the Ministry of Education has drafted recommendations for the higher education establishments. The experts have calculated that, if the heads of the higher education establishments take a constructive position, around 25,000 students could be transferred this year to vacant places under the budget-funded quota. This is a considerable number, even given the large size of the student population in general.

There has also been a response to my recommendation not to raise tuition fees. According to the information I have received from the Ministry of Education and Science, around 300 higher education establishments have already decided to set tuition fees in roubles for current students for the entire duration of their studies. This measure does mean a drop in income, but I hope that other higher education establishments will also take this course. I realise that this is a difficult measure, and I know that over these last years we moved more towards letting market principles apply to tuition fees. But I think that in the current situation, as is the case in other countries too, we now need to take a step in this direction. In any case, let’s look at how things develop this year, and we will always be able to come back to this question.

The Government will soon issue documents that will make it easier to obtain student loans. These loans will have minimum interest rates, and students will be able to start paying them back once they have graduated and found work. Under the scheme currently proposed, what we mean by a minimum interest rate is that part of the interest rate will be covered by budget subsidies. Subsidies will come to three quarters of the Central Bank refinancing rate. The scheme also provides for compensating banks for unpaid loans. Compensation will come to up to 20 percent of loans accorded. The state will thus act as guarantor for student loans. But to obtain these loans, students must demonstrate a good academic record.

Graduates this year will have a harder time finding employment. This is an issue I mentioned in one of my recent television addresses. In order to support our students, we will implement measures to retrain students for jobs that are more in demand, and increase the number of budget-funded places on masters and post-graduate programmes. This could see an increase of up to 34,000 budget-funded places on masters programmes, and up to 29,000 on post-graduate programmes. This is a big increase, but we must make sure that it does not affect the quality of education. We know that quantity does not always mean quality, and this is something we need to keep in mind.

Aside from these measures, a draft law has been submitted to the State Duma, giving educational and scientific organisations the chance to establish small enterprises. I have discussed this idea many times at meetings with the rectors and with students. This creates new opportunities to commercialise higher education establishments’ intellectual potential. The experts calculate that such small enterprises could create up to 30,000 jobs, including the kind of jobs we so urgently need – jobs involving high-technology goods and services.

One could say that these initiatives I have just listed are anti-crisis measures, but at the same time, they are also steps we need to take to modernise our higher education system. Long before the crisis began, we set the objective of producing genuinely qualified professionals, people able to create and spread the use of advanced technology, and facilitate the integration of science, education and production, in the aim of developing innovation. I therefore think this law is very timely. We will see what results it produces. In any event, it is at the very least good to have new possibilities during the current situation.

I note too, that the legal conditions for the establishment of federal and national research universities have already been drafted. The work that began as part of the Education National Project needs to continue now not at the experimental level, but in routine operation. I remind you that, as part of the national project, 57 higher education establishments that won tenders for innovative development programmes received considerable amounts of money. The funds were used to modernise the teaching processes and upgrade technology at these universities. I visited many of these universities at the time when they received these grants. These grants also made it possible for these universities to develop their own programmes and come up with original new solutions.

I will not make a secret of the fact that a considerable number of higher education establishments do not meet high teaching and research quality standards, the kind of high standards that our development agenda, our economy, and the current crisis dictate. I want to stress that, despite the difficulties we face, we need to shape our education programmes and job training to the labour market’s development prospects, and shift the focus in higher education to the most modern and advanced economic and social development models.

The development logic of the Education National Project led to the emergence of yet another model, which in its pilot version, was called the national research universities. Two such universities are already functioning, and we have already started work on establishing a whole network of such national research universities.

Based on the results of a tender, a number of higher education establishments will be qualified as National Research Universities, and the winners will receive grants to modernise infrastructure, scientific equipment, classrooms and lecture theatres – in other words, everything that universities always need the most.

I remind you too, that, despite the financial difficulties, money has been earmarked in the 2009 budget for these purposes. The financial crisis must not bring to a halt these programmes, or any of the programmes that proved their effectiveness of late.

We did not undertake and develop the national project only to have it brought to a standstill by temporary financial difficulties, and find ourselves back in the mid-1990s. This is something we cannot accept.

Creative aspirations and the desire to give education new content are an inherent part of the strategy to develop our higher education system over the years to come.

I would like to say a few words about legislative developments in education. There have been quite a few innovations in this area over recent years. This is inevitable given that we are in the process of modernising our higher education system. But at the same time, the education cycle is by its very nature a long-term process, and so we need, ultimately, to establish a solid, stable, modern legal foundation that will not be affected by fluctuations in the situation. This is what we should be aiming for.

Colleagues, during my recent visit to Spain, there was a meeting of the rectors of Russian, Spanish, and Latin American universities. One of the subjects we discussed at that meeting was educational mobility, mobility for teachers, students, the chance for teachers to raise their qualifications, and the chance to establish centres for the collective use of unique equipment. This is all extremely important for our higher education system’s full-fledged integration into the modern global education system, and for the free exchange of ideas and information. For all my love of modern technology and the Internet, I think that university life is simply not complete without personal contact, without the chance to visit colleagues abroad and receive them here. Electronic forms of communication are good, of course, but people need the chance to meet and communicate in the traditional fashion too.

This year has been declared the Year of Youth in Russia. This February, I awarded for the first time the Russian President’s Prize for Young Scientists. This was the first time these prestigious and sizeable prizes were awarded.

The presidential grants for young holders of candidate and doctoral degrees were also increased considerably. An order is near completion on increasing the presidential scholarships for under-graduate and post-graduate students. The number of scholarships will increase (to around 2,000), and their size will increase 2–3-fold.

We plan soon to hold a State Council meeting on youth policy, and all of the different issues that you are set to discuss today will be examined there too. I hope that the documents your congress produces will be used in preparations for the State Council meeting.

Colleagues, I wish you productive work. I hope that even in these difficult times we will be able to hold on to everything we have achieved over these last years, and get through this tough period, which most developed countries are now traversing, with minimal losses. The authorities will do everything possible in this respect, and I hope that the universities will also work in this direction.

I wish you good luck and success.

* * *

I just want to make two responses, and outline my positions in response to two issues that interested me, and no doubt everyone here.

I want to start with a few words in response to an issue His Holiness the Patriarch raised in his opening remarks. I fully agree with him that we need to think today not just about overcoming the crisis, and not just about the traditional concerns and problems facing all teachers and rectors, but also about forming a value system that will provide the set of references for our society’s development.

This is a very complex matter. I would say that we have probably only just started to pencil in the outlines of the modern value system that could provide the set of references for our development over the coming years of this century. Clearly, these values need to unite and not divide us. Recalling the Soviet-era value system, there was much that was false in it, but it was shared by a large proportion of our society. We need modern values that our society accepts and shares, values that consolidate our society. This is probably the most difficult thing to achieve.

I tried to set out my vision of a modern value system in my Presidential Address at the end of last year. These values are clear and straightforward, and at the same time are of exceptional importance for any country’s life: they are the values of human rights, the foundations of family life and values, and the values that underpin the way we feel towards our own country. Only now are most people in our society coming to see these values as real values. One of these values is education, education as a part of our social life, and as a crucial element in our world’s development. Whatever the case, this is a question we need to reflect on, because of we do not, we risk mistaking surrogate values for real values, as has happened more than once before in our history.

The second issue I wanted to comment on is related to main item on the congress’ agenda. We are indeed discussing difficulties and problems today, but I want to say just one thing: we cannot reduce our education development measures to crisis measures alone. If all we do is talk about how to survive the crisis, we will have no future. In this context, I support, of course, strategic initiatives such as the new education dimension, and other initiatives that you are set to discuss.

Of course we need to help students and teachers in the current situation. We need to help young graduates find employment. A number of measures have been proposed. Perhaps you will come up with other interesting ideas too. The authorities are always open to them.

We need to preserve universities’ teaching and research staff. Remember the situation at the start of the 1990s. I will never forget that time. It was then that began my own research and teaching career. I remember the humiliating situation teachers were in, and the low wages that forced most teachers to look for work on the side, and I remember that conversations at that time about the future of higher education in Russia. The atmosphere is different now. In this context, we need to think about how make use of today’s situation.

We do indeed need to make use of the crisis. We have been saying the word ‘crisis’ a lot of late, but we should not hide behind it. Remember Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous phrase about how ruin and collapse are usually in people’s heads rather than in their closets? Well, we too should not use the crisis as cover for our own inabilities to resolve the most basic problems. We need to make use of the opportunities these kinds of crisis situations create to resolve the complex problems, including those that have gone unresolved for years, and those that, for various reasons, were difficult to decide.

One more thing I wanted to say is that we really have made efforts lately to develop education. Many of you would probably say that we have not done enough, and this is the truth. But no one can say that we have done nothing at all. We have undertaken the national project, taken various other measures, and allocated considerable funds from the pre-crisis budget to education, and continue to do so, and this is all evidence that we are working in this area. But this does not mean that everything we are doing, including in the area of legislation, should be seen as a sacred cow. This does not mean that we do not make mistakes. We therefore need to evaluate what has been done, including in legislation. I propose that the congress of rectors demonstrate its best qualities, including that of critical evaluation of the situation, and think about what we could change in today’s rules regarding the way our higher education system is organized. Once again I stress that I have in mind here not the current state of affairs, but the future.

It is my sincere hope that you will work on these issues now. Thank you very much.