Entrance

Entrance to universities on favourable terms will be restricted

The society is afraid of the Educational Code, which is going to be adopted soon. People are mostly concerned that they will have to pay for their education, - announced Valentina Ivanova, head of the Russian pedagogical assembly, summing up people’s appeals to this organization. But it’s not this that must worry us. At least not all of us.

Russian people always expect some trick from new laws – it’s the result of our historic experience. And the project of the integral law “About education”, the aim of which is to consolidate all the innovations in the sphere of education and children upbringing, also startled the people. And it’s not without any reason. With the help of another law the government has just granted the right for commercial activity to the school, so people made a conclusion: they’ll have to pay for education.

Valentina Ivanova also said that different institutions, including the Russian pedagogical assembly, got a large amount of anxious questions, whether after the adoption of the Educational Code secondary and higher education will still be free.

“It will”, - answered Ivanova, quoting the latest bill version: “both secondary and higher ones will be on the competitive basis. The law keeps and fixes the current number of state-financed university places: 170 for 10 thousand people”. So from this point of view nothing will change, - emphasized she. But there will be another change: “The law will limit the number of categories entitled to special benefits during the entrance. For example the list of illnesses, giving this right. So a lot of teenagers with health problems and orphans will enter universities on general terms”.

The law will also help to reduce the number of universities. Though certainly there won’t be any concrete prescriptions, as “let there be so many universities in the country”. But there will be severe accreditation rules. And those universities, that won’t...