Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 29 – 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.
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