Why do Russian Universities quit the stage?

How will result globalization of education for Russia? Will the state support save our Universities? Is our system of Education able to overcome challenges it faces?  Rector of the National Research University  of “Higher School of Economics” Yaroslaw Kuzminov tried to answer these questions.

The main challenge is the ability of Russia to use the system of global education.

Five barriers of the Russian system of education

There are 5 barriers in solving the main challenge:

1. Information barrier. We have almost overcome it: all pupils and young people use the Internet.
2. Language barrier. Specialists in the sphere of information technologies and forecasters predict that the problem of translation for mass user will be solved till 2020.
3. Possibility of foreign operators and global players to work on the territory of Russia with our population. But we have entered WTO and in this relation a slight interest of foreign operators can be explained by the fact that we are not talking about displacement of Russian companies.
4. Barrier of incomes for entering the global education network. 
5. Barrier of salaries for worker`s import.

How can we overcome restraint of our educational system?

Some proposals:

1. We should stop being afraid that somebody may leave our country.  We should increase our global adaptation in schools, implement International Baccalaureate in Higher Schools to be able to give students an opportunity to participate in worthy programs abroad.
2. We should advance new forms:

University on the Internet. In the last 5 years there is a real outburst of the University`s presence, including Harvard, on open, not secured Internet, e.g. on videohosting YouTube. They download almost all educational resources, record their lectures and make them available for everyone.  

Additional stages of professional education. Currently the most interesting tendencies are formation of further stages that follow higher education. It is not enough to receive education only in the University. The next stage may be called pedagogical, engineer and economical internship.

We should enrich our resource support. It includes three elements:

1. Human resources;
2. Financial resources;
3. Material resources.

Speech with Yaroslav Kuzminov was recorded on plenary discussion “Competition for a person” held on Gaidar Forum – 2013. Materials for publication were prepared by Galina Dragun, E-xecutive.ru