80 Percent Of Foreign Students In Russian Higher Educational Institutions From Former Soviet Republics – OpEd

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Russian officials are proud that their country continues to attract foreign students. This year there are some 237,500. But four out of five of them – 79 percent – are from former Soviet republics and less than one percent are from Western Europe and North America combined.

Those statistics are provided by Aleksandr Gromov of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics in a new article (ioe.hse.ru/data/2016/07/13/1116424276/%D0%A4%D0%9E7.pdf) that is summarized at iq.hse.ru/news/187164580.html).

He points out that more than a third of the foreign students in Russian higher educational institutions come from a single country (Kazakhstan) which supplies 36 percent of all of them. Students from Uzbekistan and Ukraine form 11 percent each. Half of the students from beyond the borders of the former USSR come from Asia, with slightly over half of these from China.

Two-thirds of the foreign students pay for their coursework and so represent an attractive catch for these institutions, Gromov points out. Those who are in Russia on scholarship are “typically people from the former union republics” rather than from what he and other Russians still call “the far abroad.”

Just over half of the foreign students – 52.3 percent – are in undergraduate programs. Thirty-eight percent more are in specialist training programs that may or may not lead to a degree. Ten percent are in masters’ programs. The most popular fields of study are medicine, economics, administration, and the humanities.

The foreign students in Russia are highly concentrated in the two capitals and in a small fraction of the higher educational institutions of the country: Eighty percent of foreign students are enrolled in ten percent of these higher schools. The leader, with more than 5,000 foreign students, is as was the case in Soviet times, the Russian University of Friendship of the Peoples.

Paul Goble

Paul Goble is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia. Most recently, he was director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy. Earlier, he served as vice dean for the social sciences and humanities at Audentes University in Tallinn and a senior research associate at the EuroCollege of the University of Tartu in Estonia. He has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Goble maintains the Window on Eurasia blog and can be contacted directly at [email protected] .

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