David Mandel

“Optimizing” Higher Education in Russia


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talking about simple things, and these young people quickly pulled out their notebooks to take notes. So there was some desire to learn. But they lacked a foundation. I had the impression that they had been completely deprived of knowledge. This was the middle 1990s.”

      The first decade of the new millennium began with the election of Vladimir Putin to the presidency of Russia. He was Yeltsin’s handpicked successor, a man who, among other things, could be relied upon to protect Yeltsin and his “family” from prosecution.

      That decade saw the state’s return to an active role in educational policy, made possible by the economy’s emergence from its lengthy depression. There followed a decade of rapid economic growth, thanks in large part to a steep and prolonged rise in the price of oil, which eventually tripled. The recovery also benefitted from the dramatic fall of the ruble in 1998 (a devaluation that the IMF had consistently opposed) that cut imports in half, strongly boosting domestic production.

      To make matters worse, in 2008 the old centrally-fixed wage scale for public-sector employees was replaced with a New System for the Remuneration of Work. This gave heads of hospitals, schools, and universities broader latitude in spending their allotted budgets. Money that they economized on designated functions could be used as incentives to stimulate the work of employees. How that was done was supposed to be negotiated with the employees. But in the absence independent