Enhancing Access to Higher Education through University-Government Cooperation (the Case of Russian Far Eastern Regions)

A. V. Fedotov,T. N. Blinova

doi:10.15826/umpa.2019.05.037

Abstract

This article discusses issues associated with the facilitation of higher education accessibility by intensifying university-government cooperation. Existing approaches to measuring the accessibility of the higher education system as a whole and its specific components were analysed. Various aspects of the problem were investigated using the example of higher education institutions in the Russian Far East. The analysis was based on data retrieved from the Russian Federal Statistics Service and the Unified Information System of the Ministry of Education and Science. It is shown that residents in the Russian Far East receive substantial opportunities for accessing higher education as compared to the residents in other Russian federal districts. Nevertheless, the extremely low geographical accessibility of higher education in this part of Russia has a detrimental effect on overall access to higher education. On the basis of the obtained results, a number of recommendations were developed for facilitating cooperation between universities and governmental authorities in order to increase overall accessibility to higher education in this region. It is proposed to compensate for the negative impact of the geographical factor by maximizing the positive effects of other factors, for instance, by increasing the affordability of university education. Thus, students from locations with absent or very few higher education institutions may be reimbursed for their travel expenses, or reimbursement may be offered to those students who are not provided with dormitory accommodation. Universities may keep their tuition fees at the lowest rate as established by the RF legislation.

Highlights

Contemporary socio-economic development strategies require countries to ensure equal access to higher education for their citizens, resulting in the need for national governments to assign a high priority to the implementation of these policies [1, 2]
Higher education geographical inaccessibility can vary between 0 and 1. The higher this indicator is, the less access to higher education people in this region will enjoy. When we applied this methodology to measure the geographical inaccessibility of higher education in the Far East of Russia, we found that the impact of the geographical factor is significant in the Jewish Autonomous District and Chukotka
We found that the Khabarovsk and Primorye regions suffer from the most severe shortage of study places, which can be partially explained by the fact that universities in these regions are quite attractive for prospective students from other Russian regions

Summary

Introduction

Contemporary socio-economic development strategies require countries to ensure equal access to higher education for their citizens, resulting in the need for national governments to assign a high priority to the implementation of these policies [1, 2]. In Russia, the legal right to education is enshrined in Paragraph 3 Article 5 of the Federal Law On Education in the Russian Federation 1. This right is upheld by the state program Development of Education for

On Education in the Russian Federation

Conclusion