We used to have free, entirely state supported educational system. Higher education was available to any person of sufficient academic abilities. We might have had more universities and university graduates than the economy needed, but then high educational standards don't seem to do a nation any harm...Of course, facilities differ between the cities and the countryside, as well as between the centre and the provinces. But on the whole, I think, the system used to work.
After the switch to 'market economy' (perestroika) state funding has been persistently cut down and 'paid' positions appeared in universities, their number increasing every year at the expense of the 'free' places for students.
The scholarship schemes are virtually non-existent, loan offers are scarce and can't seem reliable to the populace that has yet to get to grips with the banking reality (I don't think my American friends can fully understand how different the 'money' reality still is in Russia...e.g. very few people use credit cards...and I'm not kidding!)
One viable option for a promising student who hasn't made it to a free place at a uni is finding a company that will pay his or her fees with a view to employing them after graduation for a certain period of time.
All in all, with around 50 per cent of university places still free of charge, hard-working students, regardless of their financial status, still stand a good chance of getting higher education.
Needless to say, money brightens one's prospects immensely. For instance, we have long been accustomed to having to prop up our limping school education with a crutch of private tuition. (We do it all the time one way or another for our own kids - and I also make a living from it :))
The unpleasant thing is that now the routine is sneaking into unis - with university teachers privately tutoring their students, writing papers and doing projects for them..ugh...and what is worse, selling out grades and credits...One 'paying' student's remark seems to sum it up: when asked to come and sit an end of the term exam in his university, he said,"Why should I come? I've paid for my studies, haven't I?'
Re.:'apparatchik' - that's a Soviet term...'Oligarch' and 'the New Russian' are the big words these days...
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I find it fascinating reading how your education system works, here the government will pay for one degree and then when you reach a certain income threshold the tax department starts to take out money from your pay to pay it back..it seems to work well....in the meantime reading thorough your other stories we use the internet a lot as part of our homeschooling as well as various computer programs, we recently investigated an online maths site called mathletics but as our 11 year old found several mistakes on it we decided it was not something we could use..I too fail to understand movies like the pirate one...we very carefully monitor what the children see and this is not on the list... we would be considered as old fashioned parents by most people in our culture because we do monitor what the children see hear and do...many parents in our society seem to have given up trying to let children be children and have just thrown their hands up in the air and said too hard.
However our children seem far more responsible, hard working and generally just happy... my last thought was on credit cards where again we are not the norm we got our first credit card two months ago however I use it to pay for the groceries and fuel and day to day bills and then Tom pays it off in full at teh end of each month...the whole reason we got it was that for every dollar you spend you get one point and then these points can be used to get free airplane flights so we are hoping there will be enough pioints in two years to send Tom and Laird to Greece for free....so I am afraid the credit card company is making no money out of us well now I am really going to have to get going...I enjoyed reading your blogs.
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