The State against Education

In June 2026, at the HR EXPO PRO forum, Valery Falkov, head of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, declared that Russia’s universities were producing too many graduates [translator’s note: HR EXPO PRO is Russia’s largest annual human-resources trade fair and conference, held in Moscow since the early 2000]. The labor market, he said, no longer needs “universal higher education.” In the context of the war, the statement sounds especially ominous: young people who fail to get into university become vulnerable to conscription or to pressure to sign a military contract. (Military service in Russia is compulsory.) Bronislav Sipukhin of the University Platform examines how, over the past two years, the Russian state has adopted a more utilitarian approach to higher education and sought, by various means, to reduce the number of students.

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Managing Demand for Higher Education

For some years now, the Russian state has been preoccupied with the “overproduction” of graduates who, upon leaving university, do not go to work in the profession they trained for but find jobs in other sectors. From the officials’ point of view, this means that the state’s investment in higher education is not paying off as expected. The state is also short of people to keep fighting the war in Ukraine and has an interest in channeling young people into the armed forces. Being a university student still grants a deferment from conscription, and the chance to enroll — even in a fee-paying program — looks far more attractive than going to war. The state’s measures restricting access to higher education are designed to redistribute young people toward the professions the state needs, or to draw them into the army.

On September 1, 2025, a law came into force stripping universities of the right to set the number of fee-paying places themselves. These figures are now set by the state. Under the banner of improving the quality of higher education and bringing it closer to the needs of the labor market, the number of fee-paying places in bachelor’s and specialist programs was cut by 13 percent, to 47,000. The cuts fell primarily on the humanities and social-and-economic fields most popular with applicants — economics, law, journalism, international relations, public and municipal administration, philology, and advertising and public relations. Admissions were also reduced in some technical fields, including architecture, oil and gas, and mining. The changes hit part-time and evening programs at regional universities hardest. According to Falkov, the cuts mostly affected private universities.

Amid a labor shortage and a war economy, the state is trying to steer graduates to where it believes they are needed most. Priority goes to engineering programs at universities and to vocational secondary education. Fee-paying and state-funded university places in a number of humanities fields are shrinking, while the number of state-funded places at vocational colleges keeps growing. In 2025, for the first time, a majority of ninth-grade leavers — 62 percent — opted for vocational colleges and technical schools rather than continuing on toward university. The number of places at vocational colleges already exceeds the number of state-funded university places by 40 percent.

Economically, this policy suits the state. Over the past few years, fee-paying students have come to outnumber state-funded ones: in 2025, 52 percent of first-year students entered on a fee-paying basis. The Russian authorities are not making engineering professions more attractive, nor are they reforming school education — they are simply restricting access to the humanities. In this way they are trying to redirect demand at virtually no additional cost.

Regulating fee-paying admissions is yet another curb on university autonomy. By controlling commercial admissions not only at state universities but at private ones as well, the state gains even more control over the higher education market. In this sense, the cut in fee-paying places complements other measures the authorities have taken against independent universities — for example, the revocation of the license of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (Shaninka). The changes affect state universities too. Previously they could make up for insufficient budget funding through fee-paying admissions; now that option is severely limited. Cutting fee-paying admissions may also serve to reformat universities so that they offer only their core, specialized education, as happened with Moscow City University (MCU), which closed all of its non-pedagogical programs as of September 2026.

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Declining Access to Higher Education

Even as fee-paying admissions are being cut, higher education is getting more expensive. According to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, tuition for first-year bachelor’s and specialist programs rose by an average of 10.7 percent in 2026. That is slightly less than the previous year’s increase of 13 percent, but the trend is unchanged: a university education is rapidly becoming more costly. At some universities, individual programs already cost more than a million rubles ($12,624) a year. The Business Bachelor program at Skolkovo costs over two million rubles ($25,248). A number of programs at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics — including Applied Data Analysis, Applied Mathematics, and International Business — also cost more than a million. At many universities, the increases have been uneven: at the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI, some nuclear physics programs went up by 32 percent, while at Kuban State University tuition for law rose by roughly the same amount.

Until recently, fee-paying study was a relatively affordable fallback for applicants whose scores fell short of a state-funded place. Today that option is gradually becoming a privilege reserved for well-off families.

Competition for state-funded places is growing ever fiercer. First, cutoff scores rise every year. According to HSE monitoring data, in 2025 the average Unified State Exam (EGE) cutoff score at universities in Moscow and the Moscow region was 80.9 points; in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region, 77.9; and in the other regions, 66.3.

Second, far from all state-funded places are open to general competition. Winners of school and university olympiads (academic competitions) in individual subjects can be admitted without entrance exams. This year, though, not even all olympiad winners will get a state-funded place: at Moscow State University’s Faculty of Bioengineering and Bioinformatics, 37 olympiad winners are competing for 25 places. And in every program, universities are required to set aside at least 10 percent of places for a separate quota created specifically for participants in the war against Ukraine and their children. Polina Usoltseva, managing editor of the student outlet Groza, notes that the quota for “participants in the special military operation” (SVO) is not filling up well. “According to our research, the number admitted under it nearly doubles every year: 8,730 in 2023, 15,259 in 2024, 28,383 in 2025. But even that is not enough to fill all the allocated places. The state is clearly trying to make the benefit more attractive — for instance, the quota was recently extended to the widows of SVO participants. Still, students admitted under the military quota remain only a small share of all state-funded students: in 2025, just 4.6 percent.” The 2026 admissions campaign brought a record number of applicants admitted under the war participants’ quota: 41,811.

Rising tuition, shrinking fee-paying admissions, and ever-stiffer competition for state-funded places are steadily eroding the status of higher education as a public good and deepening structural inequality. Higher education looks less and less like a vehicle for social mobility and more and more like a privilege for those who can afford expensive tuition or clear an increasingly harsh selection process. Moreover, the cap on fee-paying places takes on a sinister cast in the context of the war: young people who fail to get into university become vulnerable to conscription or to pressure to sign a contract.

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The State as the Principal Client of Higher Education

Although the overall number of state-funded places is not shrinking, getting a free place in certain fields — the humanities above all — is becoming all but impossible. For the 2026/27 admissions campaign, 620,500 state-funded places were allocated, just 1,500 more than the year before. But as Polina Usoltseva points out, the increase is largely nominal: around a thousand of the additional places went to universities in the occupied territories of Ukraine. In effect, the scale of state-funded admissions has barely changed.

“The more interesting dynamic is in how the state is trying to point those who get state-funded places toward its own objectives,” Usoltseva says.

In allocating state-funded places, the authorities follow their own staffing priorities. In 2026, the largest numbers of places went to medicine, engineering, teacher training, and agriculture, at the expense of admissions in the humanities and in programs in culture and the arts.

Russian officials have for years spoken of state-funded higher education as a state commission and of the need for the state’s “investment” to pay off. The words of Vladimir Medinsky are telling: a student whose education the state pays for but who owes the state nothing, he said, is “budget money thrown away.” Only now is this rhetoric being turned into concrete laws. In 2026, a law on mandatory post-graduation service for medical students — dubbed the “serfdom law” — came into force. Graduates of medical universities and colleges, whatever the form of their studies, will be required to work for one to three years, under the supervision of a mentor, within the compulsory health insurance (OMS) system — that is, in state institutions. Without completing this service, a doctor cannot fully pass the periodic accreditation required to keep practicing. State-funded residency training is being converted entirely to a targeted model: the student must sign a contract with a state medical institution, which will pay for the training, and the contract can be terminated only after the cost of the training has been repaid to the state. The law offers graduates no guarantee of a decent salary; responsibility for working conditions has been shifted entirely onto the regions. Predictably, the law has provoked a hostile reaction among medical students, unhappy with the restriction on their freedom to choose a profession and the prospect of working in state institutions for low regional wages. It is highly likely that they will be sent not to Moscow or St. Petersburg but to regions where the shortage of medical staff is most acute.

According to Usoltseva, since the adoption of the mentorship law for graduates of medical universities and colleges, officials and rectors have periodically discussed mandatory service for other professions as well. “As soon as the law for doctors was passed, people started saying that the same system was needed for lawyers and for teachers. Fortunately, mandatory service hasn’t been introduced for them yet.” It is unlikely that the Russian authorities will bring back the Soviet system of job assignment for all graduates. But new laws on mandatory service for particular professions cannot be ruled out. For the state, this is a convenient tool for dealing with staff shortages: instead of raising wages and improving working conditions, it gains the ability to hold specialists in the public sector by force.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the Russian state treated higher education purely as a service; now the approach is being modified somewhat depending on the source of funding. It is a state commission for those whose studies the state pays for, and still a service for those who can pay. This approach means not only tighter bureaucratic control over universities but also ever greater restrictions on the academic and professional freedom of students themselves, who are increasingly seen as a resource that must yield a return for the state.

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Recruiting Students for the War

Since January 2026, universities themselves have become recruitment sites for military service, and being a student now does little to reduce the risk of ending up at the front. From the start of the year, a large-scale campaign has been under way at universities and vocational colleges across the country to draw students into the newly created Unmanned Systems Forces (USF). As IStories previously established, the plan was to recruit around 79,000 people into these forces. By Groza’s count, some 269 universities and colleges took part in the campaign. Institutions put up recruitment posters and held recruitment events at which students were urged to sign a one-year contract with the USF in exchange for payments of up to five million rubles ($63,120), the preservation of their place at their institution, and service far from the front line. According to human rights advocates, all of these promises were false.

Institutions also resorted to psychological and administrative pressure to force students to sign. Maria Kirsanova, director of the Novosibirsk College of Transport Technologies, called those who refused “cowards” unwilling to defend the motherland. Elsewhere, administrators tightened the rules for retaking exams or threatened students with poor grades with expulsion if they refused to sign. Timur Tukhvatullin, co-founder of the student support project Molniya, describes how the campaign evolved between winter and summer 2026:

“Pressure on students peaked in February and March, when the state and university administrations had the impression that threats and deception might work. Once it became clear that there were few takers, the emphasis shifted to ‘improved contract terms,’ advertising aimed at women, and a more formal approach. Then new deception schemes appeared: the contract began to be offered under the guise of alternative civilian service (which is supposed to replace military service) or as a mandatory condition for obtaining a deferment. Promises of guaranteed university admission after service appeared. In June and July the campaign was sluggish, but that does not at all mean it won’t resume in the fall.”

The failure of the campaign to recruit students into the USF owes much to passive resistance — from students, who simply did not sign, and from teaching and administrative staff, who carried out management’s orders only formally or even sabotaged the campaign. Just how modest the results were is indirectly confirmed by the Ministry of Defense’s own figures. On July 17, Deputy Defense Minister Alexei Krivoruchko reported that around 8,000 specialists had been trained in the first half of the year. By the estimate of the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), that is only about a quarter of the target: by mid-year, the ministry was supposed to have trained 34,000. How many of those 8,000 were students is unknown. But at least one contract soldier recruited during the campaign is known to have died: Valery Averin, a student at the Buryat Republican Technical College, was killed near Luhansk on April 6.

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Behind the fight against “excess” higher education lies a fight against higher education as a public good and against universities as spaces of critical thought. The state wants to make more rational use of the “resource” being trained in universities, so as to extract more return from higher education. This “rational” use includes limiting the scale of higher education by administrative and market means, in order to redirect the freed-up human resource into blue-collar trades and to the front. “Universal” (that is, accessible to all) higher education is of no use to the state in a political sense either. Too many critically minded people with a higher education would inevitably put the existence of Putin’s regime at risk.

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