Russia has started an experimental new degree system that will offer scholarships and employment incentives to get more university students to study engineering and other subject areas that the nation’s leaders say are needed to help spur its economic growth and fill holes in the labor market.
Starting in September, students can enroll in the applied bachelor’s program to earn bachelor’s degrees while getting on-the-job experience. Participants will receive government financial aid and guarantees from universities that they will find employment upon graduation, and will spend half of their time working in factories, offices, and other workplaces.
While primarily focused on technical professions like computer programming and automobile design, the program also includes degrees in teaching, biology, and business management.
But while the program has been hailed as a way to improve Russia’s economy, some say it is a historical throwback. Participation in the program by students and universities is voluntary, but critics argue the experiment could lead to a revival of the Soviet practice of state-mandated work assignments for university graduates.
Russia’s lack of skilled people for certain jobs has been a growing concern among the country’s politicians and academic leaders for years.
For example, Russia’s president, Dmitri Medvedev, has lamented the nation’s shortage of engineers, saying the decline in enrollment for engineering studies is slowing down the “entire economy.” Though a lawyer himself, the president has complained many times about the number of universities training lawyers; only in a city like St. Petersburg, he has said, would there be 100 universities offering legal education.
To ameliorate such concerns, the education ministry decided to experiment this year with the applied-bachelor’s idea—and the higher-education system has reacted positively.
About 100 Russian universities applied to administer the new four-year-degree program, and seven were chosen. They include Tyumen State Oil and Gas University, Siberian Federal University, Viatka State University, and Kazan State Technological University.
One of the goals of the programs is to forge stronger ties between the universities and businesses.
For example, Kazan State University plans to educate 20 people in chemistry as part of the applied bachelor’s program. Like cooperative programs in United States and Canada, the students will spend part of their time working at companies like Danaflex, a packaging manufacturer. In return the businesses have promised to hire the students at the end of their studies.
Echoes of the Soviet Era
Alexander Leibovich, first deputy director of the Federal Institute of Educational Development, a think tank that helped develop the experiment, said the applied bachelor’s would help Russian higher education adjust to the needs of the labor market.
“Our experiment’s goal is to move our bachelor students into the real economy at the very early stage. These seven first universities will show an example to others,” Mr. Leibovich said.
He also said the experiment would give more credibility to the four-year bachelor’s degree, which Russian universities began widely offering only three years ago, thanks in part to the Bologna Process. So far the four-year degree is looked at skeptically by some Russia businesses.
“Russian employers, especially in nonhumanities areas, were used to receiving graduates with five years of training for specific professions,” he said.
One of the universities in the program, the National University of Science and Technology, in Moscow, will prepare professional welders for construction and metal-producing companies. The university’s deputy director, Vladimir Kuznetsov, said the experiment was a sign of significant progress in higher education in Russia.
“Even most of our fourth- and fifth-year students have no idea where they will work after graduation,” he said. “The applied-bachelor program that we launch in September will be a firm bridge between the university and employers, allowing students to feel comfortable about their future. By the end of the fourth year, our students will have a choice between potential employers waiting for them.”
Twenty years ago, all Soviet students lived with a clear picture of what would happen after graduation: They would be given a five-year job assignment by the state. Rather than remove anxiety, though, this became a problem for some students.
Students of Rostov-on-Don’s medical university, for example, would be sent to work in hospitals in the far north, where they were unprepared for the severe winters.
Rather than easing the transition to the work force, raspredelenie or labor allocation, made millions of Soviet students worry about their future.
While Russian lawmakers have discussed the possibility of restoring the old system, Igor Bunin, founding director of the Center for Political Technologies, a consulting group in Moscow, said that modern Russia would not go back to it, no matter how bad the employment crises gets.
“In totalitarian Soviet Union, we had no choice. We had to give the state years of our work to pay for our education,” he said.
Mr. Bunin continued: “Today, Russian students have plenty of options; they can pay for their education, find a sponsor to pay for it, or take a state credit and pay it back by doing state-assigned jobs. This experiment is just an attempt to see how Russian graduates would like the state looking for jobs for them.”