RAO academics and experts criticized plans to cut the number of universities, warning this could worsen Russias scientific and technical lag. They also questioned licensing and accreditation criteria as outdated and too mechanical. Participants say in a crisis it is more important to support universities using distance and electronic technologies, and to assess them by real scientific achievements and education quality, not formal indicators.

At a joint meeting of the expert councils of the State Duma Committee on Education and the Central Council of the public movement “Education for All,” academicians of the Russian Academy of Education challenged the planned measures to reduce the number of higher education institutions. In their view, this will lead to a worsening of Russia’s scientific and technological lag behind the West.
The meeting discussed the criteria proposed by Rosobrnadzor for the licensing and accreditation of higher education institutions. The Russian Ministry of Education and Science proposes to speed up work on this issue in order to carry out the reduction of higher education institutions more successfully. In the opinion of Doctor of Economics Yuri Davydov, the “purge” of universities is completely untimely now. The academician noted that today in Western Europe there are 50,000–55,000 people per higher education institution, while in Russia there are 130,000 people per institution. Judging by these figures, the number of higher education institutions in the country should actually be doubled.
According to Yuri Stepanovich, today in Russia only 20.6% of the working population has higher education, and this is not enough for scientific and technological progress. In a state oriented toward a knowledge-based economy, such a population should make up at least half.
The academician called on government agencies to act properly during the crisis so that hundreds of thousands of Russian students and teachers do not end up on the street. The academician also criticized some “purely mechanical” accreditation indicators. For example, in order for an educational institution to be called a “university,” it must have at least seven fields of study, 60% of its teaching staff with academic degrees, 10 square meters per full-time student, and so on. In Yuri Davydov’s opinion, these indicators have long been outdated and do not at all serve to improve the quality of education. For first-year students, far more important than teachers with academic degrees are teachers with strong methodological training, capable of effectively conveying the necessary knowledge to the learner.
Yuri Davydov was supported by Vladimir Tikhomirov, chairman of the expert council on e-learning and information technologies in education of the State Duma Committee on Education. He expressed bewilderment at the disregard for distance learning in the Russian Federation. Tikhomirov stated that in times of crisis, those higher education institutions are more viable that make full use of electronic learning technologies, which make it possible to retrain millions of people quickly and inexpensively. And the accreditation standards proposed by the ministry are designed mainly for “paper-based” educational technologies. Meanwhile, it is precisely in the field of distance education that there is now a complete profanation, having nothing in common with certified electronic technologies.
The chairman of the Association of Non-State Higher Education Institutions of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Zernov, noted that it was high time for Russia to begin making a qualitative leap in the number of inventions and discoveries, breakthrough innovations. This is not happening. And it will happen only when the accreditation indicators are based not on the number of teaching manuals, the number of square meters per student, and defended dissertations, but on concrete scientific achievements and new educational technologies. It is precisely this point that the published indicators miss.