In Russia, free higher education is guaranteed, at least nominally, under the constitution. And it has fueled public enrollment: More than 1 million new students entered Russian institutions of higher learning this year.
However, a cost might soon materialize for many of those students if the State Duma approves a majority-backed bill that it is currently working on.
Under the bill, in a revival of a Soviet-era practice, students who have obtained their education at government expense would work three years of service at the direction of the state upon graduation. The first to fall under the bill would be medical students, who instead of enrolling in the hospital internships that have become widespread, will enter into work assignments known as “mentoring.”
Why We Wrote This
Every country debates how students should pay for higher education. Russia’s new plan is to try an old – i.e., Soviet – solution: by requiring graduates to do national service in exchange for student loans.
It’s all part of a wider reform of higher education, in which Russia is abandoning earlier attempts to integrate with the European system that it views as working in favor of liberal globalization to the detriment of the domestic talent pool. Instead, the country appears to be reverting to the Soviet system of a four-year combined bachelor’s/master’s degree, which might then be followed up with the equivalent of a doctorate.
But the “mentoring” reform is causing debate within Russia over just whom the new system is serving. Critics decry the effective costs it places on “free” education, and the debt of labor it puts on graduates. But advocates say that the work the graduates will provide is much needed in underserved communities – and that it’s perfectly natural for society to expect a young person who’s received an education at taxpayers’ expense to give something back.
“What’s so bad about the former Soviet education system?” says Larisa Popovich, an expert with the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. “It’s just reasonable to expect someone who receives an expensive education, and the chance to choose a profession, to do a bit of service for the good of the people.”
Fair payment or forced labor?
Post-Soviet Russia has adopted a system in which about half of its approximately 5 million post-secondary students have their tuition covered by various levels of state support, while the rest pay their own way. The criteria for receiving a free education can be complicated. They include academic excellence, but – according to official sources – such assistance is also extended to students from impoverished backgrounds or large families, orphans, disabled people, and, increasingly, veterans of the war in Ukraine.
The idea of obligatory service has triggered a lot of controversy.
Supporters argue that sending recent graduates out to regional clinics and hospitals, where they will help relieve chronic staff shortages, will give them more valuable hands-on experience than interning in a city hospital. If the pilot projects with medical students work out, they add, the system can quickly be extended to students in other fields, especially engineers, teachers, and even journalists.
Critics have a list of objections, beginning with the argument that obligatory service makes a mockery of the Russian constitutional guarantee of free education for all. They also point out that the Soviet-era infrastructure for such a system has long vanished. Implementing it in practice probably means throwing students into remote areas with no provisions for their housing and other living conditions, much less guarantees of further practical education that is implied in the term “mentoring.”
“You can call it ‘mentoring,’ but in fact it will just be obligatory labor,” Dr. Alexey Kurinny, a Communist Party deputy, said in a statement emailed to the Monitor. “I have been meeting with medical students [who will face this requirement] and they are very wary of this proposed innovation. Most just see it as an additional burden to bear.”
Konstantin, a second-year medical student who declined to give his family name due to privacy concerns, says he’s ready to face the obligatory service, but adds that he’s dubious it will benefit his professional development in the way advocates are claiming. He worries that he’ll be thrown into an understaffed regional clinic where he’ll be required to carry out whatever tasks are at hand without any systematic oversight, much less the “mentoring” that is promised.
“I hope I’ll have the strength to put in this time, and maybe it will raise my professional qualifications,” he says. “But I can foresee a lot of difficulties. Wouldn’t it be better to be allowed a free and independent job search?”
Another complicating factor is that Russia’s health care system, like higher education, has become a mix of public and private services. Russia’s constitution guarantees free medical care for all, but those who can afford it pay to attend private clinics and hospitals, which have better-paid staff, prompt service, and the latest equipment and treatments. About 5% of Russians maintain private health insurance, though it’s thought to be as much as 20% in big cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Dr. Kurinny says that around 25% of medical school graduates don’t come to work in the state health system at all, and presumably find places in the private sector instead.
“Inefficiencies and unintended consequences”
Analysts differ over the reasons for the overhaul of higher education and the new requirement for state-supported graduates to perform obligatory service. Some argue that Russia’s current leadership, being composed mainly of people who came of age in the USSR, are handling the country’s growing isolation and alienation from the West by reaching back for tried-and-true Soviet methods for organizing economic life in similar circumstances.
Others say the main driver of the reform is Russia’s acute labor shortage, particularly a lack of skilled workers, amid wartime conditions. The public health care system was already under strain, especially in far-flung regions, because qualified personnel gravitate to the big cities where pay and conditions are better. The idea of sending thousands of new graduates out to fill gaps in the system each year is politically seductive, they say.
“The deficit of certain professionals is great, and wages in the public sector aren’t high enough to attract graduates of the best universities,” says Oleg Buklemishev, an economic policy expert at Moscow State University. However, he says it’s not possible to re-create the comprehensive former Soviet system in today’s conditions and adds, “Why would we want to?”
A better approach, Mr. Buklemishev argues, would be to follow world practice and adopt a system of cash loans to support needy students through their education. “This idea [of obligatory service] is highly unpopular, and a lot of people are afraid it will only lead to all sorts of inefficiencies and unintended consequences.”
Dr. Kurinny says his party, the Communists, will support the law. But he argues that deficiencies in the public health sector need to be addressed with more robust measures than just throwing a few thousand new graduates into the system each year.
“The basic problem in the public system is low salaries and high workloads faced by doctors,” he says. “We need major increases in state financing to address these issues, or they will remain,” with or without an annual injection of recent graduates who are required to put in the time.
