Russia is increasingly falling behind developed countries in terms of education. Is this a coincidence or a systemic policy?

For many years, education served as one of the main forms of social mobility, and it worked quite well. But in recent years, this elevator has broken down.

The modern education system has its origins at the end of the 19th century. To some extent, it was, of course, shaped by the growing industrial economy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but if we look at the numbers from the early 20th century, we’ll see that the percentage of people receiving higher education was extremely low. In 1900, even in the most advanced countries, the share of people with higher education rarely exceeded 1% of the population, while by 2020, in most developed countries, it surpassed 70%.

However, there are two important points to mention here.

First, people differ greatly in their potential to absorb information. The level of education they can achieve, their level of competence, and their qualifications will be different for each individual.

The higher the level of education a person can achieve, the fewer — I would even say, dramatically fewer — people are ready for that level of education.

As long as higher education was not widespread, we did not have a problem with its quality. Or rather, the problem existed, but was not very significant, because the barrier to obtaining higher education was so high that only a few could overcome it — and, naturally, most of these few were able to master that level.

Of course, there were both class boundaries and income-related barriers, but still, a fairly large share of those who received higher education were highly motivated people with a very high level of intelligence.

As soon as higher education became mass-accessible, it began to cover both those who were highly motivated and intellectually prepared, and those who were barely suitable for such education. But as you expand the number of people receiving higher education, you inevitably include more and more people who are less suited for it. Economists would say that the marginal effectiveness of each additional person with higher education became much lower.

Essentially, the same thing happens in any market and in any selection process.

Second, if you analyze the relationship across different countries between the number of years people spend studying, GDP per capita, and life expectancy, you’ll see that life expectancy affects the average number of years of education even more than per capita GDP. In fact, the longer people live, the more time they have to devote to education.

At the same time, naturally, the cost of training a truly educated person is constantly increasing.

All of the above leads to a fairly clear conclusion: every year, there is increasing devaluation of those types of education that used to be, let’s say, elite.

So, if 5% of your population had higher education, you could be sure that most of them were very high-level people. If 60–70% of your population gets higher education, in reality, these people have significantly lower qualifications than those who were engineers, say, a hundred years ago.

Thus, the average level of a university graduate is falling, while the cost of education keeps rising.

In these conditions, the education market can develop according to the following scenarios.

First scenario: inertia. Maintaining the status quo

Society continues to produce a cohort of people with higher education, but there are no jobs for them, since society cannot provide all of them with jobs that match their formal qualifications. The negative consequence of this scenario is the devaluation of higher education, as it ceases to serve as a social elevator.

In this case, simply obtaining a higher education does not guarantee that a graduate is an effective worker capable of performing the tasks assigned. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a future scientist, engineer, doctor, or lawyer.

Further selection and training of specialists in such a system is handled by the market, where those who continue to work hard on themselves and acquire additional skills succeed. That is, you have to engage in self-education, study on your own, master business models, move from job to job, upgrade your qualifications, and fight tooth and nail for a place in the competitive market.

With this scenario, some graduates will have a good career, while others will end up working the cash register at McDonald’s. Even though, formally, their diplomas will show the same qualification.

Second scenario: differentiation

The second option is when higher education becomes the baseline, and most of the population actually receives it. But in order to be considered truly highly qualified and intelligent in today’s world, you need to go through additional levels of education. This is roughly how it works in medicine, where after university, residency is a mandatory stage.

Of course, this is to some extent an egalitarian approach. Now, with the declaration of social equality and the desire to provide equal opportunities, it may cause significant rejection, especially when a huge number of people have become politically active through social networks and are all trying to access quality education and a high standard of living. Naturally, creating another level of education at the state level is unlikely to be welcomed by the mass voter. Therefore, for now, it is less feasible than the first scenario.

Thus, either the hierarchy in qualification and pay will be shaped by the market, or the model of multi-level education will become even more complex and multi-tiered.

Most likely, the optimal solution will be a combination of these two models. In some places, the labor market will dominate, using business schools, corporate universities, and retraining courses to prepare personnel for itself; in others, the state, through universities, will prepare staff for science, education, medicine, and public service. In medicine, for example, such a system is already largely in place.

Third scenario: artificial slowdown

But there is another option — artificially reducing the number of years of education. In this situation, the state deliberately slows down the transition of people from secondary to higher education. That is, it artificially restrains and lowers this pyramid.

This is exactly the path Russia is now trying to follow, just as the Soviet Union tried to do at certain times in its history. In 1940, to reduce the influx into universities, the USSR introduced paid tuition in grades 8–10 of secondary schools, in specialized secondary institutions, and in universities. At that time, Stalin did not need doctors and engineers, but needed peasants, workers, and soldiers.

A second turn to such a policy, though in a somewhat milder form, happened in the USSR in the 1980s, when the country began to experience a shortage of workers while the number of people with higher education was growing. As a result, from 1982 to 1988, the number of students in the USSR steadily decreased.

And now the Russian authorities are again starting to sharply reduce the number of schoolchildren who can finish grades 10–11. At the same time, in universities, with no increase in state-funded places, the number of fee-paying places is also being cut. Meanwhile, the total number of high school graduates has remained stable in recent years, and according to Rosstat, will hardly change in the coming years.

In fact, access to higher education is shrinking, especially considering that tuition fees at the country’s top universities are skyrocketing, and the number of students with privileges and olympiad winners is also rising just as fast.

Meanwhile, in Russia, from the early 2010s to the early 2020s, the number of people entering universities decreased from 7 million to 4 million. And this is one of the few countries in the world where the share of high school graduates enrolled in universities is falling: from 86% in 2019 to 60% in 2024. In most developed countries, it continues to grow, because the level of technological development in the modern world demands it.

It’s hard to say whether this is more about a conscious fight against educated people or simply a lack of money for education due to military spending. But the fact remains. Russia is starting to fall even further behind developed countries in education. And if this process of slowing higher education continues for even another five years, it could lead to Russia fatally lagging behind developed countries in living standards and technological development for the rest of the 21st century. And that is very sad.