HSE Rector Kuzminov on New Students, Career Expectations and Building a Competitive University

HSE Rector Yaroslav Kuzminov gave an interview to Moscow 24 TV about how prepared new first year students are for the most popular courses and about the careers of HSE graduates

— What do you think about the 2014 school leavers, is the current version of the USE preparing them properly for university?

— This year, the exams were formally the same, but the education watchdog Rossobrnadzor made a principled approach to how the USE is organised. For every subject the results for passes were on average 5-10 points lower than last year, for example. There’s no need to get upset about this as it all happened because of a drop in bogus marks. It’s nice that we’ve had high scores in Moscow, once again, and that’s after we discounted the cheating - this year it’s been obligatory to delete the false results. The other innovation is that prize winners at school olympiads this year had to get good marks in the USE  as well to skip university entrance exams.

— How much has the entrance mark requirement changed in various HSE faculties?

— In a few, mainly computer sciences faculties, it has gone up. In others it has gone down 10 - 20 marks, even down by 40 marks in some places (we have 4 exams with 10 marks for each). It’s fallen most in the humanities because of the low results for history across the country, and gone up most in computer sciences. 

— So which subjects are the most popular?

— Again, it’s computer sciences. We set up a computer sciences faculty with Yandex and we’ve had one and a half times more olympiad prize winners applying than for regular state-funded places. We decided to offer them all places. We allocated another 35 state-funded places for students just taking the USE so now we have 233 students with about 200 state-funded places. We’ll pay for them ourselves. We don’t get any extra money for them but I think that it’s our duty to teach such strong candidates if they come to us. 

— What about careers. Students graduate from the HSE and what then?

— At the moment I’ve heard that students are changing direction that they’ve stopped going into business and the real economy. I think that’s not the case with our students. Although HSE is a government supported university and 15% of our graduates go into government administration, 80% find work in the real economy, in business and private companies, and I think that is a good thing. Quite a large number of students become entrepreneurs. We have a strong and well-known business incubator which supports many projects and a number of them find their feet in the real world.

— Are there new things in the study programme?

— Our study is known to be demanding. The HSE is a very serious university. But our system of  independent choice for each student is a major innovation. At Moscow State University and at HSE we started huge experiments to widen the number of courses a student can select. Students are already grown up people and they can sign up to courses freely in different faculties and broaden their outlook and knowledge.

— A final question, I have to ask, how competitive are Russian universities? What is the HSE doing about it? It’s a hot topic right now.

— It’s easy to tell how competitive a university is. A university is different from a technical college because academics teach there and do research. We are developing fast both as a research university and as a project-research university which works on real projects in the economy and in computer sciences. Our students work in the research laboratories with leading academics and I think that is the most important condition for competition.  It’s a strategic investment, not just for the HSE’s international position but for what we can give our own, Russian economy.

Source: ‘Moskva 24’ TV