Ilya Prakhov | The Accessibility of Higher Education

We define access to higher education as the opportunity of entering university through the results of selection based on the identification of the applicant’s knowledge, regardless of SES. The Russian system of admission to higher education underwent a major institutional transformation with the introduction of the Unified State Exam (USE) in 2009 to unify the process of admission to higher educational institutions (HEIs).

The reform was intended to make higher education more accessible by simplifying the admission procedure. However, despite the unification of the admission process, inequality of access to HEIs still persists for different cohorts of students. During the lecture ‘The accessibility of higher education’ we analyze the sources of the emergence and spread of the inequality of access to higher education under the USE in Russia. We consider the results of recent studies related to empirical assessments of the factors and mechanisms (individual, parental, schooling, regional) which limit accessibility of higher education in Russia.

Ilya Prakhov, PhD in Economics, HSE University.