Unified rules of the game for higher education

Petr Safronov, Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology of the Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation: “The legislator is trying to create common rules of the game”

One more step has been taken towards the recognition that the model of higher education that existed in the Soviet Union and was inextricably linked with the Soviet ideal of the welfare state has died. The state does not abandon the idea of ​​education as a public good, but it recognizes by law that this public good is now understood and provided in a fundamentally different way than in the conditions of a planned and socialist economy.

What can be attributed to the merit of the law? It introduces distance education into the legal field: traditional full-time and distance learning is complemented by the opportunity to acquire knowledge using electronic learning tools, modeled on what the famous MTI - Massachusetts Institute of Technology does.

The second significant plus is that the law describes all stages of education - from kindergarten to graduate school and residency. The legislator is trying to create uniform rules of the game and uniform norms, according to which we can evaluate different stages of the educational process.

Opponents of the law believe that we should maintain a system in which all bachelor's graduates flow by default to master's programs, and all master's graduates to graduate school. But the situation when people inertially move from one stage to another is irrational. The new law will allow inertia to be destroyed - because the master's program is provided for those who want to do science. And the majority of undergraduate graduates should enter the labor market.