Foreign Students - The Migration to Russia

Transcription

1 Russian Education and Society, vol. 52, no. 1, January 2010, pp M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN /2010 $ DOI /RES E.E. Pis mennaia The Migration of Foreign Students to Russia Although Russia has a long history of attracting foreign students to its universities, it needs to do more to increase their number as well as to attract more students from the countries of the former Soviet Union. According to forecasts, the competitive struggle on the worldwide scale to attract foreign students is going to get more intense, as many countries see students as the most desirable category of migrants. The world market of educational services has been estimated at $50 60 billion. The economically developed countries, such as the United States, Switzerland, Great Britain, Germany, France, and others, are actively attracting students. Over the past several years, for example, the U.S. State Department has been allocating substantial funds to implement programs abroad designed to develop student exchanges and bring foreign students and instructors to study and teach in the United States. In 2002 there were 500,000 foreign students going to school in the United States, giving the country at least $15 billion. Considering the present demographic situation, Russia could be English translation 2010 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text 2008 Narodonaselenie. Migratsiia inostrannykh studentov v Rossiiu, Narodonaselenie, 2008, no. 1, pp A publication of the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies of the Population (ISEPN), Russian Academy of Sciences. Translated by Kim Braithwaite. 69

2 70 russian education & society doing more to take advantage of the migration potential of young people in the Commonwealth of Independent States [CIS] and the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The number of foreign students has fallen compared to the Soviet era; foreigners account for not more than 2 percent of the students and graduate students in the higher educational institutions of Russia. Far from being exhausted, the reserves of the Russian system of education will actually increase as a result of the decline in the contingent of secondary school graduates. Many institutions of higher learning are attempting on their own to enter the foreign educational markets. However, under the conditions of the increasingly fierce competition in the world, it is a matter that requires a state policy of promoting our system of education in other countries and advertising Russia s educational institutions. Foreign students and graduate students migrating to Russia for an education has quite a long history. In 1865, at a meeting of the council under the minister of public education, the decision was made to begin teaching foreign citizens in the educational institutions of the country. Students from Bulgaria, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and other countries came to Russia to attend the University of St. Petersburg and the University of Moscow as well as a number of civil and theological educational institutions. The government of Tsar Alexander II instituted special state stipends for them [1, p. 28]. However, the education of foreign students in prerevolutionary Russia did not become widespread; rather, Russia s citizens most often went abroad to go to school, especially for the technical specialties. In the early twentieth century, the number of foreigners attending the leading higher educational institutions of Europe was as high as 10 percent of the total number of students. For example, 263 of the 2,750 students enrolled in the Berlin Polytechnical Institute were foreigners; at the De Lisle Industrial Institute in France, 31 out of the 364 students were foreigners. All of these students were enrolled on a tuition basis and yielded a profit for the higher educational institutions of Western Europe. At the Berlin Polytechnical Institute, for example, a German student had to pay 60 marks for tuition, while a foreign student had to pay 160 marks [2, p. 90].

3 january The Soviet government also had a policy to attract foreign students. The year 1921 saw the creation of a specialized educational institution, the Communist University for Working People of the East, with foreign students from forty-four countries, including Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, Mongolia, and elsewhere. Until the Great War for the Fatherland [World War II], students, graduate students, and interns were enrolled on a small scale in party, Komsomol, and trade union schools. After the war was ended, students from Eastern Europe and Asia, and later on Africa, Latin America, and Western Europe, began to come to the Soviet Union to go to school. In 1945, there were only twenty foreign students attending the higher educational institutions of the USSR [3, pp ]. The first twenty-five students from China came to attend higher educational institutions of the Soviet Union in 1948 [4, p. 12]. In 1952, the Soviet Union and the People s Republic of China signed a long-term agreement for the training of national cadres that were needed for the social and technical reconstruction of the national economy. The agreements spelled out the conditions governing the training of Chinese citizens in the higher educational institutions of the Soviet Union, specifying their numbers and specialization. All the Chinese students and graduate students were provided with dormitory accommodations and stipends that were the same as those for Soviet citizens. From 1948 through 1966, about 25,000 Chinese specialists were trained in the Soviet Union (both in institutions of higher learning and in secondary specialized educational institutions), for the most part in fields of engineering and technology, which were the ones that were most needed in the national economy. During that period, many prominent state leaders of the People s Republic of China graduated from Soviet institutions of higher learning. After 1966, for reasons that are well known, there began a lengthy hiatus in Sino-Soviet relations, which lasted until 1983, when cooperation was renewed by mutual consent. In 1984, after an absence of almost twenty years, students and graduate students from the People s Republic of China once more began to enroll in the higher educational institutions of Moscow and Leningrad. As time went on, their numbers increased, and by the beginning of the twenty-first century at least 10,000 citizens of the People s

4 72 russian education & society Republic of China had graduated from Soviet and Russian institutions of higher learning. The year 1960 saw the creation of the University of Friendship of Peoples in Moscow, by decision of the government of the USSR; later it was given the name Patrice Lumumba University in honor of the first president of independent Republic of Congo. It became one of the world s most important educational institutions engaged in the training of foreign specialists. Classes in the main faculties of the university began on 1 September The first graduating class of 288 young specialists from forty-seven countries of the world took place on 29 June The decision to establish the University of Friendship of Peoples in the Soviet Union had been made by Soviet leaders in response to the wishes of the governments and societies of countries liberated from colonial dependency. The main purpose of the university was to provide assistance in training highly qualified national cadres, educated in the spirit of friendship among peoples, for the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America; the aim was to give young people there, first and foremost those from low-income families, the opportunity to acquire an education. Students were selected for admission through civic organizations and government institutions, and later by embassies and consulates of the USSR. The founders of the University of Friendship of Peoples were the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, the Soviet Committee of Solidarity of the Countries of Asia and Africa, and the Union of Soviet Societies of Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. In February 1975, the university was awarded the Order of Friendship of Peoples for its services in the cause of training cadres of specialists for countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In February 1992, it was renamed and designated as a state higher educational institution: the Russian University of Friendship of Peoples, with the government of the Russian Federation as its founder. In the forty-five years since its founding, it has gained world recognition as an honored authority and a major educational and science center, ranking in third place among the universities of Russia. More than 47,000 of its graduates and 4,300 candidates and doctors of science are working in 165 countries.

5 january Table 1 Dynamics of the Number of Foreign Students in the World and in the Soviet Union, Number of foreign students in the world, thousands Number of foreign students in the USSR, thousands % of foreign students enrolled in the USSR as a proportion of the world number of foreign students , Over forty years, from 1950 through 1990, the total number of foreign students in the Soviet Union increased by more than twenty times (see Table 1) [5, p. 10], and on the eve of the disintegration of the Soviet Union it stood at 126,500, about 11 percent of the total number of foreign students in the world. This made it possible for Soviet institutions of higher learning formally to rank in third place, after American and French institutions of higher learning in terms of its number of foreign students (according to UNESCO data, in 1990 the United States had about 408,000 foreign students, and France had 136,000) [2, p. 90]. It is believed that in reality there were more foreign citizens attending school in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s: not counting foreigners enrolled in military schools, over 120,000 in 1980 and 180,000 in 1990 [6, p. 66]. The calculation took account of trainees and graduate students in Soviet party, trade union, and Komsomol schools that had the status of higher educational institutions and issued diplomas certifying a higher education, whether in politics or something else. This information was not submitted to UNESCO, the State Committee for Statistics, and the Ministry of Education, and this accounts for any statistical discrepancies. In 1990, foreign students, interns, and graduate students were attending almost 700 educational institutions and scientific research institutions in 120 cities and population centers of the Soviet Union,

6 74 russian education & society with 23,500 foreigners in Moscow, 16,500 in Leningrad, 8,000 in Kiev, 5,000 in Kharkov, 4,000 in Minsk, and so on. During the Soviet era political motives were predominant in the training of foreign cadres, and the training was provided to developing countries as assistance that did not have to be repaid. Specialists were trained for industrial, energy, or military facilities being erected in these countries with the help of the Soviet Union. Scientific and pedagogical contacts, the exchanges of students and instructors, were conducted for the most part with the countries of the socialist camp, and almost 80 percent of the foreign students came from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Sixty-six higher educational institutions (universities, institutes, university centers, specialized faculties, and branches) were created with the help of the Soviet Union in thirty-six countries that were allies of the USSR, along with 23 secondary specialized educational institutions, more than 400 centers providing primary vocational technical education, and 5 general education schools. In addition to providing help in the construction of these educational institutions, the Soviet Union also provided them with up-to-date laboratory training equipment and supplied them with educational and scientific methodological literature; Soviet specialists helped with the organization of the teaching and learning process (in the 1980s, as many as 5,000 Soviet instructors and specialists were sent abroad every year for these purposes) [1, pp ]. Overall, more than 800,000 foreigners obtained an education in the higher educational institutions of the Soviet Union and, later on, Russia and the other countries of the CIS. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 put an end to the system of training of foreign students that had become established. The 1990s were a time of particular difficulty in the international activity of this country s higher education. Higher education was conducted under difficult social and economic conditions, in the course of constant reforms of higher education itself, reforms that were not always well thought out or justified. As a matter of fact, the financing of many areas of international activity on the part of institutions of higher learning came to an end. As a result of inadequate financing, cultural centers were closed down in a number of

7 january the developing countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and also the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe. More than 500 educational institutions in foreign countries that had been created with the assistance of the Soviet Union no longer had Russian support and were transferred to the sponsorship of other countries. Russia, which had ranked in third place in the world (after the United States) in the number of its foreign students in the 1970s and 1980s, lost its position in the world education market. For example, after the collapse of the Soviet Union the number of foreign students from the far abroad attending Russia s institutions of higher learning declined by two to three times. In 1992, the recruitment of foreign citizens to attend school here on the basis of state assistance came to a complete halt. Many of the largest institutions of higher learning that had been engaged in the training of specialists for foreign countries for a long time, and in large numbers, found themselves in a very difficult situation (Moscow State University, St. Petersburg State Technical University, the Russian University of Friendship of Peoples, the Moscow State Highway Institute, and Voronezh State University). The termination of the practice of offering state stipends to foreign countries for the purpose of training and upgrading the qualifications of their citizens in the educational institutions of Russia led to a decline in the level of bilateral relations with many foreign countries; it resulted in the loss of the ability, through training specialists, to have an influence on maintaining the geopolitical interests of our country. After the termination of the practice of recruiting on the basis of state quotas, admissions on the basis of the contract form of training ended up being the main form by which foreign citizens enrolled in the higher educational institutions of the Russian Federation. The conversion from the state system of recruitment to the situation in which every institution of higher learning was only able to count on its own resources when it came to recruiting foreign students, did not take place painlessly. Every institution of higher learning experienced a lack of the necessary connections, experience, normative legal foundations, and specialists. It marked the beginning of a period that confronted higher education in this country with

8 76 russian education & society Table 2 Percentage of Foreign Students Among All Students in Russian Higher Education, Total number of students enrolled in state and municipal higher educational institutions, thousands 3, , , , , ,596.2 Percentage of foreign students Source: Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik 2004 (Moscow, 2004), p a complex of very serious problems relating to its entry into the world market of education. In the period from 1998 through 2003, the percentage of foreign students among the entire contingent of students in Russia s institutions of higher learning did not exceed 3 percent, and in recent years it has had a tendency to go down (see Table 2). It is reasonable to say that the basic factors that hinder the development of Russian higher education s international relations include the virtual absence of a unified state policy in this field; inadequate budget financing; inadequate information support for international cooperation; a lack of stable relations with international organizations, foundations, and programs in the field of education and science; and the fact that some institutions of higher learning do not have much experience in international activity. There have been some signs that certain changes are taking place in Russia on the state level. An important role in the formulation and practical implementation of the necessary measures is played by the Russian Chinese Commission on Cooperation in the Field of Education, Culture, Health Care, and Sports, which was created in December Meetings of the commission s subcommissions

9 january on cooperation in the field of education are held every year in China and in Russia. The historic Treaty on Friendship and Cooperation that was signed in 2001 between the People s Republic of China and the Russian Federation gave a new impetus to bilateral cooperation in the sphere of higher education. One of the solid results of the expansion of international cooperation between higher educational institutions in the People s Republic of China and the Russian Federation was the conference exhibition of Russian institutions of higher learning that was held in May 2001 in Beijing, under the heading Russian Higher Education in the Third Millennium. Events of this kind had not been held before in China with the participation of Russian institutions of higher learning, as a result of which China s young people were not well informed about the opportunities offered by Russian education. In subsequent years, similar exhibitions of educational services provided by Russia s institutions of higher learning have been held in Shanghai and Beijing, and Chinese exhibitions have been held in Moscow and St. Petersburg. There has been a substantial expansion of direct bilateral (partnership) ties between Russian and Chinese institutions of higher learning, and academic exchanges of students and instructors [4, p. 13]. In 2004, A. Zhukov, the vice premier of the government of the Russian Federation, announced the creation of a joint institution of higher learning between Russia and China; the plans call for conducting the instruction in accordance with the joint educational programs of the higher educational institutions of the two countries. Emphasis was placed on the necessity of comprehensive mutual support for the study of the Russian language in China and the Chinese language in Russia. The deputy head of the government also thinks that it is essential to speed up and firmly establish the plan of cooperation in the field of education to the year 2008, which calls for raising the quotas of academic exchanges on the state basis from 100 to 500 people per year [7, p. 8]. The conception for the dynamic entry of this country s system of higher education into the international educational space calls for the establishment of direct partnership ties between this country s higher educational institutions and foreign institutions,

10 78 russian education & society and, moreover, not just in the world-renowned institutions of the capital cities but also in state-run institutions of higher learning in the Russian Federation. In particular, in the framework of an agreement on academic cooperation signed in the spring of 2006 between the Piatigorsk State University of Linguistics and the University of Asyut in Egypt, thirteen students and three instructors at the beginning of 2007 went through two months of training in the Egyptian institution. A discussion of the prospects of cooperation between the Piatigorsk institution and the Pedagogical University of Changchun in China resulted in the signing of a Memorandum of Mutual Understanding, which laid the groundwork for long-term academic partnership, and also a number of agreements that call for the exchange of students, instructors, and interns. Yet another possible area of cooperation is the creation of the Center of Chinese Language and Culture, based in the Piatigorsk institution jointly with the Pedagogical University of Changchun. The institutions are focusing on the establishment of a joint educational program within which Russian students will be able to go through two years of training in Changchun and acquire the bachelor s diploma at the Chinese institution and, after that, complete their education at the Piatigorsk institution and be awarded the corresponding Russian diploma. The same opportunity is also offered to Chinese students who are being trained as Russian-language instructors [8, p. 23]. The exporting of educational services is one of the most significant items of revenue of the majority of the developed countries [9, pp ]. The competition among the countries that export education is entering a new round; new players are coming onto the scene, and in the next decade it is very likely that the world of education is going to be divvied up. By 2025, the total number of college students in the world will rise from 97 million today to 260 million. According to UNESCO forecasts, by that time there will be 5 7 million foreign students, and two-thirds of them will come from Asia. India and China will be the leaders when it comes to supplying students, and so these are the regions where the competition will unfold. Russia does not have a state policy when it comes to the sphere of the international migration of specialists and students, the kind

11 january of policy that takes account of the experience of foreign countries. It is essential now to sign protocols (agreements) between the government of Russia and the country s institutions of higher learning (institutions of the Russian regions) that are taking in foreign students, on the one hand, and the countries of their origin, on the other hand. It is also necessary to advertise this country s secondary specialized and higher educational institutions in other countries. It is necessary to offer discounts on the amount of tuition paid by students and graduate students from the CIS countries and the Baltics in the higher educational institutions of Russia. It is necessary to build and remodel dormitories for foreign students and to ensure their safety while they are in Russia. These measures will make it possible to attract foreign students so that some of them can replenish the population of a particular region. There are a number of reasons why educational migration is so important for Russia. In the first place, it produces an economic effect: the system of higher education brings in money. In the second place, it has a political effect: foreign students enrolled in this country s higher educational institutions will become the elites in their own countries, and this will make it possible to establish firm, mutually beneficial political and economic ties with developing countries and help to reenforce Russia s geopolitical and economic position in the various regions of the world. In the third place, educational migration has a demographic effect: foreign students may replenish the population of Russia s regions. Some foreign students who have acquired a Russian education, who are fluent in Russian, who understand Russian culture, and who have become adapted to the Russian labor market, can be seen as potentially becoming future citizens and workers. Russia could be more active in drawing upon the migration potential of young people (potential students and graduate students) in the countries of the CIS and the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This country has experience in the case of the activities of a number of universities in the countries of the CIS (similar branches in the near abroad have been set up by Moscow M.V. Lomonosov State University, the Russian State Social University, the New University of Russia, and other institutions of

12 80 russian education & society higher learning). In the framework of a comprehensive target program providing support for Russians who live abroad, stipends of the mayor of Moscow were allocated for for students from the countries of the CIS who were enrolled in the institutions of the capital city in which the instruction is conducted in Russian. References 1. Podgotovka spetsialistov dlia zarubezhnykh stran v Rossii: sostoianie i perspektivy razvitiia. In Materialy k VI zasedaniiu Mezhvedomstvennoi komissii po mezhdunarodnomu partnerstvu v oblasti obrazovaniia 29 aprelia 1999 g. Ch. I. Moscow, Golubev, V.K.; G.E. Gorchakov; V.P. Myshelov; and A.M. Khomiakov. Uroki proshlogo v sovremennom rakurse. Vysshee obrazovanie v Rossii, 1994, no Arabskaia Gramota. Newsweek, 2004, no Aref ev, A.L. Tendentsii v obuchenii grazhdan KNR v rossiiskikh vuzakh. Moscow: Tsentr sotsial nogo prognozirovaniia, Sheregi, A.F.; A.L. Dmitriev; and A.L. Aref ev. Nauchno-pedagogicheskii potentsial i eksport obrazovatel nykh uslug rossiiskikh vuzov (sotsiologicheskii analiz). Moscow, Berdykcheva, N.M., and A.A. Grigor eva. Ekonomika obrazovatel nykh uslug. Energiia, 2005, no Otechestvo sozdaet obshchii vuz s kitaitsami. Kommersant-Den gi, 2004, no Edut gosti na Kavkaz. Poisk, 23 February Galushkina, M. Eksport obrazovaniia. Ekspert, 2004, nos To order reprints, call ; outside the United States, call

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