International Higher Education, Summer 2004

International Higher Education in Russia: Missing Data

Alex Kuraev-Maxah
Alex Kuraev-Maxah is a doctoral student in higher education at Boston College. Address: 207 Campion Hall, Boston College, Chestnut Hill MA 02467, USA. E-mail: kuraev@bc.edu.

Throughout its history, the Soviet Union was widely considered to be a “closed society.” Examples of the country’s profile include restrictions on foreign travel, a lack of transparency, and keeping the outside world ignorant about conditions within the country. A common thread was the lack of publicly available data or the provision of false data on a variety of topics. Perestroika put an end to that isolation and opened doors to the global integration of the former Soviet nations. However, some of the old Soviet habits die hard. Anyone involved in research on higher education in Russia knows it is very difficult to obtain accurate statistics on the subject. The database on foreign student mobility continues to be restricted and problematical, which makes it impossible to assess internationalization of Russian higher education.

The Current Situation
The former Soviet leadership proudly proclaimed the USSR to be a world leader in higher education, providing impressive statistics on the numbers of foreign students studying in the country. Fact sheets from Soviet times claim that “all the advantages and high quality of Soviet education attracted in 1989 over 130,000 foreign students from more than 160 countries.” At the same time, specific information concerning this topic was considered classified and thus kept in the “restricted section” of the Federal State Archive. Even today, the data have yet to be released.

Given the right to engage in international cooperation on the institutional level by the 1992 Federal Education Act, Russian universities initiated a nation-wide movement to attract foreign students. For the last decade, data collection concerning international students has occurred at the institutional level and been submitted to the Ministry of Education. It would be reasonable to assume that with the introduction of reforms in the management of the Russian university system, the issue of data inaccessibility would be eased.

This change has not, however, taken place. Statistics on foreigners studying in Russia reported in local publications are very limited and are often contradictory. Based on the same data source, the Ministry of Higher Education, two national statistical reports show very different figures for the total number of foreign students in Russia in the 2000–2001 academic year: 95,957 and 61,426, respectively. The same problem of inconsistency characterizes almost all of the published information on international students in Russian universities.

Data Collection
Next comes the question of how foreign students are counted in Russia and, to a certain extent, attempting to analyze that process creates more questions than answers. First, all the approximately 35,000 students from the former USSR republics studying in Russia are now classified as foreigners--identified as students from the “near abroad.” Confusingly, published statistics in Russia usually present the annual numbers of students from close and distant foreign countries separately, providing no unified system for counting the total number of international students.

Another difficulty is the complexity of the Russian university system, in which anyone taking evening classes or external courses is considered an “enrolled student.” A person might live and have a full-time job in the Ukraine, return to Moscow twice a year to pass exams and collect course materials, and still be counted as a fully enrolled foreign student from Europe. Trainees or researchers from abroad are also counted as students, even if they are students in their home countries. The official website of the Russian Ministry of Education, invites foreigners to come and study in Russia, presents 13 different categories available in the Russian higher education system for foreign students. It is difficult to make sense of these different categories.

If Russia is to take advantage of the many opportunities for collaborative research and internationalization, there needs to be better access to pertinent and useful data and more accurate statistics.