Higher Education in Transition to a Market Economy: Two Case Studies

THE IDEA FOR THIS ARTICLE came from a visit to Tomsk that took place in May 1997. The authors visited the State University of Tomsk, one of Russia's leading universities, with an enviable research record and very good library and computing facilities, and were fortunate enough to be able to interview senior staff of the university concerning their budgets and financial situation. Apparently the situation in Tomsk is not especially bad; indeed it may well be rather better than elsewhere in Russia. In order to have a little basis for comparison and to provide a second case study, we also investigated some aspects of the financial arrangements at the Economics Faculty of Moscow State University. What we learned from these two cases-admittedly far from a representative sample-not only revealed a great deal about the current state of higher education reforms in Russia but also provided a snapshot of the state of Russian economic reforms in general. Hence although this article is partly about Tomsk and Moscow, it is also about these wider issues. In significant respects, Russia remains quite distant from a well-functioning market-type economy, and some of these respects are important for the higher education sector. In a very fundamental sense, one could identify the main source of Russian shortcomings in reforms as a general problem of the state.1 However, this is not the place for a general review of such a major topic. Instead, in this article we focus on a few aspects of Russia's reforms in so far as they affect higher education, namely (1) ownership, property rights and governance issues; (2) funding issues and the state budget; (3) the tax regime and (4) non-functioning of the market economy. In what follows, therefore, we proceed as follows. First we outline some general issues relevant for the reform of a system of higher education moving away from former, Soviet-type structures, focusing on the Russian situation; then we present the case studies of Tomsk and Moscow. The following section examines issues concerning higher education in particular and the reform process more generally, as highlighted in the two case studies and in the light of the above four issues. We end with a short concluding section.