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Moscow News. According to official statistics, every third Russian is a student
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According to official statistics, every third Russian is a student. That is roughly 40 million people. This includes 20 million schoolchildren and three million undergraduates. The rest are adults. And they are ready to pay a lot of money to get another, additional, education.
If, 20 years ago, a person wanted to make a career, he would ask his boss to send him to the Marxism-Leninism University or to the Higher Party School. In the late 1980s, the Russians were told, for the first time, that this was not the way to do it.
The era of business education began in 1988: Under a resolution by the USSR Council of Ministers, two higher commercial schools were opened – one at the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and the other under the auspices of the Academy of the National Economy (later it came to be known as the Higher School of International Business).
Nowadays a Russian citizen has more or less the same choice of educational, training, and retraining opportunities as a European.
The first option is training courses. A training course is a short course supposed to equip you with skills needed for a particular job. For instance, an international school of management selects a group that initially is trained in telephone communication skills. This means that for several hours a day you are put through all sorts of situations that could occur in a telephone conversation.
After that your instructors will take pity on you and let you go, and probably issue a paper saying something nice about you. Yet this paper will have no legal force, and I do not advise you to show it to anyone. It's just a souvenir. You cannot get an official training certificate if your curriculum is under 72 hours.
The second option is refresher courses.
To enroll, you have to have a relevant professional education. The course leads to a certificate. It can include international training programs, in particular, MBA programs. The third option is professional retraining courses.
The curriculum is designed for more than 500 academic hours. The courses are available to those who would like to acquire a new specialty but have sufficient professional skills not to waste time on a second higher education. Completion of such a course is certified by a special insert added to a standard diploma.
The fourth option is a second higher education.
A second higher education diploma can only be received after 2, 000 hours of training and instruction. This is precisely what puts off many individuals who already have a job. Mainly because they have to study too many subjects that are part of an academic curriculum while an adult wants to acquire practical, hands-on skills and knowledge for a new job.
When parents select a school for their child, they exercise extreme caution, endlessly picking and choosing. But when adults select a school for themselves, they often fall for a foreign-sounding name, or succumb to promises of glamorous prospects that -their-future job purportedly holds-for-them.
Manager on a Picket Line
Management is among the most popular specialties that adults can master within a relatively short time. Instruction is provided at the numerous business schools. Short training courses in basic management attract Russians because they are by and large affordable. Today an MBA degree, respected the world over, can be obtained in Russia for $3, 000 to 55, 000 after 18 to 24 months of training. In Europe, an MBA program will cost 10 times as much. Yet, in shelling out for education, aspiring MBAs in Russia do not always realize that they actually pay for an attractive and well-packaged refresher course.
In Europe with its excellent traditions of university-level economics education business schools occupy a special niche. They are open to people with practical experience. MBA schools abroad do not admit those who have no practical business experience.
In Russia, however, business management training has not been available for a long time, so business school students come from various professional backgrounds. Many of them have neither managerial experience nor connections in the business world. And acquiring experience and connections in 18 months of intensive study is no mean feat.
It is little wonder therefore that domestic employers sometimes prefer university graduates who have studied economics for five years at one of Russia's oldest higher education establishments, to business school students.
The situation is made worse by the fact that business schools in this country have no state accreditation. Their rights and duties are no different from those of a private dress-making course. These educational establishments live off the fees paid by their students and so are eager to teach anyone who has applied and passed exams.
Future managers are trained in the basics of their profession in the hope that they are grown-up enough to find a job for themselves. True, given general unemployment, even adults sometimes behave like children. A few years ago, a graduate of the Higher International Business Management School, exasperated by his failure to find a job, picketed his educational establishment.
Finally, the Education Ministry made an unorthodox decision — to issue a standard diploma to those who have completed an MBA program. This means that, all being well, several business schools offering MBA programs might receive state accreditation. Therefore their graduates will have an edge on the job market with their state approved diploma. nonetheless your correspondent was told at Mirbis school run by the Plekhanov Economics Academy that they still had a long way to go before those diplomas could get state recognition.