| MSU took 93rd place in the ranking of the best universities The pride of domestic education - Lomonosov Moscow State University is not very well regarded on the international labor market, and over the past year it has even lost weight. According to the results of the 2006 ranking (compiled by the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES), a specialized supplement to the British newspaper The Sunday Times), over the past 12 months, the main Russian university has lost 14 positions in the top 100 best higher schools in the world. Today, Moscow State University occupies only 93rd place in this ranking, reports Lenta.ru.
The THES study, which is based on the opinions of almost four thousand academics from around the world and large employer companies, showed that the United States is the undisputed leader in the quality of international higher education. It is American universities that occupy almost the entire top ten of the list, not excluding the first place, which, like last year, went to Harvard University. Only Great Britain offers a weak resistance to American higher education, whose universities improved their performance this year and slightly pushed aside the Americans in the top ten. British Cambridge and Oxford moved up one place and took second and third places. In addition, Imperial College London moved from 13th to ninth place. This is an almost invisible but important victory for Europe, which has long been trying to create an alternative to the American higher education system.
Moscow State University, which also joined the ranks of European fighters against the dominance of American education, having recently joined the Bologna Convention, was unable to provide worthy competition to its overseas rivals this time. According to the compilers of the rating, the reason for such a sharp decline in Russian universities is the decline in the quality of teaching subjects and the level of development of the teaching and educational base. However, for Russia, even such a result should be comforting, because other domestic higher education institutions were not included in the THES list at all.
At the same time, Moscow State University still remains among the leaders of national higher education. True, there is no objective rating in Russia yet that takes into account the opinions of the scientific community, feedback from employers about graduates, and the impressions of graduates and students themselves. The Ministry of Education is only developing criteria that would allow universities to be ranked. A competition held within the framework of the priority national project “Education” can be considered a certain intermediate stage, when 17 best universities received state grants for development. However, there is still no national rating comparable to foreign analogues, which would also be recognized by both the educational community and business. Although work is being carried out, in parallel, both by the ministry and the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, whose leaders consider it necessary to set guidelines for employers. Nina GUGUSHVILI |
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