Vladimir Putin’s introductory remarks:

Good afternoon, friends.

Viktor Sadovnichy (President of the Russian Rectors’ Union and Rector of Lomonosov Moscow State University) and I have long been planning to meet in this format. I am very glad that we are doing it on the eve of the new academic year. I would like to congratulate you all on this event, on the start of the new academic year, which is just several days away. I would like to wish all of you –  your students, staff and faculty – all the best and much success. The same to your undergraduate and postgraduate students.

You represent the Russian Rectors’ Union, which brings together the heads of practically all the country’s higher educational institutions, an association that enjoys well-deserved authority. Together with the government, you are tackling the challenge of improving higher education in Russia. The Rectors’ Union, of course, plays an indispensable role in this effort and acts as a constructive and committed partner. Together with Viktor Sadovnichy and many of those present, we have been discussing problems of specific educational establishments and of the community as a whole with some regularity.

I am convinced that we all share an awareness of the fact that quality modern education is the guarantee of the sustained development of our country, the foundation for realising one’s potential and for expanding social and economic opportunities for all the country’s citizens, and a strategic resource of Russia that we must strengthen and make full use of. It is thanks to our strong higher education system that our country has scored many successes and come out ahead in the global competition at critical junctures in history – suffice it to recall the nuclear and space projects.

Yes, today we have many achievements and accomplishments that we can be proud of. Of course, there are also problems to be solved. But I am convinced that the Russian education system has preserved its main competitive advantages. We face the problem of the brain drain. That shows that we are failing to create conditions to make the best use of our talent, which is not the fault of the higher education system (we are not going to discuss these problems here, we will talk about them at another forum); but it also shows that higher education system produces a level of quality that is in demand among big companies, both in Russia and abroad, and among research centres.   

Graduates from Russian higher education institutions set the tone in the world's leading centres and high-tech companies, and this applies not only to previous years, there are many fresh examples as well. 

In recent years, the number of students from the CIS countries, Latin America and Africa studying in Russian higher educational institutions has risen. The high number the students from these countries was typical for the Soviet Union, but now there is an increasing number of students from western European countries, China and the United States as well.

It is very important that while living through such difficult times, we have managed to keep our best traditions alive, and the continuity and quality of higher education intact. For the most part, of course, this was possible thanks to the brilliant work of professors, teachers and university and school teams – their faithfulness and devotion, and awareness of their responsibility for the future of Russia. On this basis, we can set new challenges, improve Russian higher education in line with the demands of time, societal requirements and national development goals.

For the last six years, state investment in higher education has increased more than three-fold. In 2011, about 390 billion roubles are allocated towards that purpose from the federal budget alone. For comparison, we allocated only 115 billion roubles to the same end in 2005.

In concentrating our financial resources, we simultaneously began transforming the system based on the logic that it will help us form a strong core in the higher education system.

Moscow and St Petersburg State Universities received a special status. We established eight federal and twenty nine national research universities. About 70 billion roubles will be allocated to support these higher educational institutions in the next five years. They should become the driving force for the development of entire macro-regions, strategic sectors and set an example for other higher education institutions. After establishing this base we will need to take the following steps: we will have to upgrade the entire system of higher education in Russia and ensure that honorary titles – university, academy and institute – in practice truly corresponded to the modern, quality, intensive education that will provide students with modern knowledge. In total, we have 1,090 civil higher education institutions in Russia.

I’m convinced that any higher education institution should have the potential to reach a higher level. For that purpose we are creating a set of different tools and incentives, trying to maintain competition, of course, to encourage initiative and the appearance of meaningful and clear development programmes. It is on the basis of this competition that we are allocating funds for strengthening the innovative infrastructure of higher educational institutions. I'm talking about 9 billion roubles for the years 2010-2012.

We have launched a programme of grant support with a total value of 12 billion roubles to attract the world’s best specialists to Russian universities. Almost 200 universities and higher educational institutions took part in the first round of the contest for the allocation of these funds.

Educational centres received the right to establish small and medium-sized innovative companies, investing in them the results of their intellectual activity. More than a thousand such enterprises have already been established. I'm sure you followed these discussions in society and in the government, and are aware that we had both positive and negative opinions. Those who were against these proposals put forth their own arguments that we had to consider. I am sure that we made the right decision though – as I said more than a thousand such enterprises have been established. 

These companies do not have many employees, about five people on average, and their average annual income is 80,000 roubles, which is not a very high annual income, but for a postgraduate or a student in his or her final year, it is considerable support. And the annual revenue per an employee is 214,000 roubles on average.

We are planning to distribute benefits when establishing such companies not only for budget institutions but for autonomous ones as well, considering that more and more higher educational institutions are trying to become autonomous. We have already prepared the respective amendments to the legislature and will ask deputies to consider them during this year’s autumn session.

Moving on. We have allocated 19 billion roubles for the implementation of high-tech joint projects of higher educational institutions and private businesses. Russian companies will be able to use the results of the research and development and promote new products and technologies on the market, while universities will have the opportunity to strengthen the educational and research base, providing their employees, students and postgraduates with promising and upmarket jobs. You all know, but I will repeat once again that higher educational institutions will receive these funds (which are federal funds, state funds) from companies, which will invest an additional 50% of funding and guarantee the promotion of the intellectual products that will be developed together with the institution. In my opinion it is essential that we harmonise education with the requirements of the economy and the labour market. We need to ensure close cooperation between universities and potential employers. 

We are planning to adopt a law soon that will expand the powers of the board of trustees of higher educational institutions. These changes involve including representatives from business and the regional executive power on the board of trustees. They will have to take an active role in developing educational programmes in line with the needs of certain territories and specific industries. The respective draft law is being considered by the State Duma and has already passed the first reading.

Allow me to remind you that we have envisaged a separate area on qualification standards within the Strategic Initiatives Agency. I very much rely, esteemed colleagues, on your direct engagement. I would very much like you to participate in developing these standards, to turn them into real guiding points that would help fill respective vacancies in the market. We have already had positive experience with this. Currently, a consortium of universities is working with the United Aircraft Building Corporation, which allows for a strict specialty division while preparing engineering personnel.

In this respect I would like to note the tendency of recent times. This year the admission results in higher educational institutions revealed that there is an increasing interest in engineering and technical professions (which I am very pleased about), and moreover, that this interest is demonstrated by the most qualified, strong and ambitious school graduates. Incidentally, applied mathematics and physics have become the absolute leaders in terms of the highest passing grade of the unified state examination, surpassing the previously most popular upmarket specialties, such as international relations.

I believe that the higher educational institutions have also greatly contributed to this, as this is a result of your efforts, colleagues, since lately you have been working closely on issues of career guidance and have started working with talented schoolchildren, guiding smart, promising and enthusiastic young people and helping them to maintain their passion for innovation and creative research through the system of academic contests and competitions.

I would like to ask the Union of Rectors to continue paying special attention to cooperation with schools, institutions of elementary and secondary professional education. In my opinion, this could be highly beneficial. I am referring to the participation of higher educational institutions in professional upgrading of teachers, providing teachers’ guiding materials and developing education kits for senior high school students and distance learning programmes.

I would naturally like to speak about some of the problems we’ve been facing recently. Unfortunately, this year’s university admissions campaign has confirmed that some of the problems have become systemic in nature. And sometimes such problems arise… You can’t even call it a problem at first, since laws are actually being followed, but I will not be speaking about any criminal issues. As you are well aware, laws are violated in every sphere, everywhere; let the experts deal with that. But I will not be speaking about such issues now. I would like to talk about those situations in which the law is observed formally, but the essence of these situations has nothing to do with providing high-quality education, the universities’ primary task.

In their efforts to increase the number of students – but in fact they are trying to get funding – a number of universities fill state-funded places with students with  extremely low unified state examination grades. The average passing grade was lower than 50 in seven Russian universities. What does this mean? All of us know what this means. This means, that the grade is a weak three under the old Soviet system. Is this selectivity? Of course, not. Moreover, according to the results of the latest admission campaign several dozen universities – I would like to stress this, at first the preliminary figure was 87, but then the minister corrected me, he said the figure may be lower than that, but still there are several dozens of universities which fell short of the number of state-funded students they are permitted to admit. What does “fell short” mean? Of course, it happened because people don’t want to study there. The generation born in the mid 1990s is currently entering university, and the birth rate dramatically declined during that period. But if people keep away from a higher educational institution, and don’t want to get even a state-funded education there, this is, of course, a warning for us. First and foremost, it is a warning to the rector and cause for him or her to seriously think about whether the educational institution is in demand and what kind of specialists it can train. The same can be applied to the universities establishing non-core departments – where, in addition to food industry specialists, economists are trained, but it's only child's play compared to what is on the way… And what if food industry specialists, or power engineering specialists and food industry workers are being trained at a law university together with lawyers… These are totally incompatible things.

And sometimes, let me put it like this, we come across clear dumping at some universities. They set tuition fee for self-funded students lower than the state financing standards allow. Why is this done? It is done to make money and preserve the educational institution. They consciously offer an inferior education, because you can’t hire highly skilled teachers for this money, you can’t support the learning process, purchase equipment and so forth. Of course, this discredits the higher educational system, directly violates the rights of young people to acquire professional knowledge, and makes them less competitive on the labour market. Such universities must gradually quit the stage. The principled stance of the Ministry of Education and Science, the entire professional community and, first and foremost, the Russian Rectors' Union is crucial in this matter.

Of course, the universities should be made more open. This concerns both the character and the results of the admission process, maintaining high education standards, and assessing the quality of education. Ratings of universities should become an important tool. I am aware that many rectors support them. But I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the rating process cannot be turned into a corporate, backstage procedure. The consumers of education services must get unbiased ratings, and you can get them only by engaging the leading researchers, experts, public figures, and of course, the business community – the consumers of your product.  

Rehabilitating education will allow us to increase support for universities that have maintained high education standards, and increase investments for their programmes and development projects. Funds that are being used inefficiently today should be used instead to finance state-funded scholarships which are in demand, and to prepare quality specialists that the Russian state and society need most. In this regard, I would like to say that we are launching a pilot project – increasing financing for the programmes to prepare engineers in ten universities of Russia. We will evaluate the results and take a decision on extending this practice.

I would like to stress that the increase in investments for educational programmes naturally allows for payment raises for professors. And I would like to touch upon a very important issue, friends. The education system is held up by professors and teachers, first and foremost. This is clear.

The average pay within Russian higher education is currently 21,700 roubles, which is slightly below the national average for all industries. Only in 26 of the regions is this rate equal to or higher than the local average for all sectors. And if you discount the salaries for top university management, this figure is even more modest, to say the least.

I’m sure you are aware of our recent decision to raise the salaries of primary and secondary school teachers. Now we need to do the same for higher education. Within the next year, we should bring the pay in academia up to the all-sector average in every region, and then have it exceed this rate. 

There are no linear solutions to this problem; we need to address it collaboratively.

The way federal authorities approach pre-college pay increases is quite simple: we allocate funds, and each of the recipient schools decides on its own how that money should be distributed between repairs and salaries. But of course, these pay increases are not uniform, as maintenance needs differ from school to school. 

It’s unlikely that this method would be applicable to colleges and universities, however, because institutions of higher learning do not all report to the same authorities. So we need to come up with some other solution.

I’d like the Education and Science Ministry and the Union of Rectors to submit concrete proposals about how this problem could be solved. This could include analysing administrative spending, which has been growing quickly over the past few years, often to the detriment of universities’ core activities – that is, teaching and research.

As you probably know, (Russian) universities currently have the tendency to create additional posts and units; some have as many as 20 deputy rectors on their payroll. This is why so much of the treasury money goes to support universities as corporate structures rather than institutions of learning.

There is one other aspect I have to mention. The salaries of a university’s top management often exceed the average salary of its teaching staff by eight or nine times, and with bonuses factored in, it can be as much as 15 times as high.

I hope you understand me correctly. I’m not saying that top executives should not be well-paid. But the principles used in establishing payroll amounts ought to be justified and transparent to all employees. Otherwise it would be difficult to create an appropriate working environment.  I’d like the Education and Science Ministry to look into this.

Of course, this is not to say that salaries for university teaching staffs should be increased solely by slashing the pay of top executives.  First of all, it's very important that the principle of distribution of resources should be fair. And secondly, there are other, increasingly large “non-core” expenditures that need to be cut down.

If we analyse the situation, we’ll see that similar processes are going on at government agencies as well. We should bring them under close scrutiny in order to do away with non-essential expenses and redistribute the funds that are saved towards pay increases. Please, consider this matter together with Mr Fursenko (Education Minister).

Another important issue is housing. Without proper accommodation facilities, it is difficult for universities to attract and keep qualified personnel. A lot of this depends on the regional authorities. Belgorod University, for example, has had nearly 70 professors from other regions come and join its teaching staff thanks to the additional residential facilities provided by the region. In my view, this is a good example of a responsible and far-sighted position on the part of the governor and his team, people who see their colleges and universities as a driving force of their region’s economic, cultural and spiritual growth.

For our part, we’ll see what we can contribute using federal resources. I’ve already discussed this problem with Viktor Sadovnichy, (Moscow University Rector). And I’d like the Ministry of Regional Development, the Education and Science Ministry, the Housing Developments Foundation and other agencies concerned to submit relevant proposals that could help us deal with the housing problem for members of academia. The more effective use of state-owned land is just one step we could take to deal with this problem.

Speaking of dormitories, we will have saved 2.5 billion roubles on the ministerial balance this year. We’ve decided to channel that money into repairs and renovation of university dorms. We will also launch federal programmes of the kind we’ve been running in other sectors.

For instance, we will be constructing facilities as part of preparations for the FIFA World Cup, but with the need for student accommodations in mind. This is already the case in Kazan, where preparations for the Student Games are now in full swing. I truly hope that due attention is paid to the promotion of sports among the youth, primarily students. In Kazan, we’re building a campus to accommodate athletes coming over for the Student Games. But after the tournament, all of these facilities will be handed over to Kazan University to be used as dormitories. Most of the buildings have been completed already, and students have already moved into some of them.

We will do the same as we build infrastructure for the forthcoming APEC summit in Vladivostok. Here, too, we’re building a campus to accommodate the forum participants, which will then be transferred to the Far Eastern University. In my view, this is a one-time project. And I’d like Mr Sadovnichy and all of you to think about how this could be developed further. Incidentally, we could hold our next meeting of this kind over there, in Vladivostok, and I would be happy to show you around the construction site.

But of course, beautiful buildings cannot solve the problem on their own. Human resources are the key. At Vladivostok University, a promising new rector has come on board and I hope we will all support him in this ambitious development. This is extremely important for Russia’s Far East as well as for the rest of the country.

Starting in 2012, we’ll be paying Russian Federation scholarships to the top undergraduate and postgraduate students who are pursuing programmes in engineering and other areas that are most relevant to Russia’s high-tech ambitions.

We need to create the conditions for the academic mobility of students, both undergraduate and postgraduate. This includes streamlining procedures for providing scholarships for university programmes in Russia and abroad. To do this currently, we have to use some complicated financing schemes.

To truly increase the accessibility of education, we need to resolve the dormitory issue, which I spoke about some moments ago.

Another important issue has to do with the need to create a free and accessible environment at colleges and universities. We need to take this problem on gradually, without rushing. We need to create an (emotionally and physically) comfortable environment where people with disabilities can receive a quality education so that they will be able to go on to lead a fulfilling life. They should have easy access to all classrooms, laboratories and dormitories.

In conclusion, I’d like to thank you for the support that you provide to the Russian Popular Front. It means a lot to me on a personal level. But the important thing is that this will create additional opportunities and open channels of communications for the entire community.

I hope that in the run-up to the next parliamentary elections, we will not only consolidate our efforts, but will also shed light on the problems we’re currently facing and work together to solve them.

Thank you very much for your attention.

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Vladimir Putin’s closing remarks: 

I'd like to thank you once again for this meaningful conversation. I don’t know whether there are any other important issues of higher education that we have neglected.  But it seems to me that we have examined this issue from every angle. And the questions we've raised are very important, not just for public education, but for our national development as a whole. As you probably know, I worked at one time as an assistant rector at the University of Leningrad (now St Petersburg). And I can see no reason why I shouldn’t continue to help higher education in my current capacity.

I appreciate your help and support, both within the framework of the Russian Popular Front and in addressing the problems that stand before us as a nation. Thank you very much.