Excerpts from Dmitry Medvedev's opening remarks at the Government meeting.
From Dmitry Medvedev’s opening remarks:
Government Meeting
We have set the following goal: no less than five universities should make it into the Top-100 within a fairly short period of time, towards 2020. We need ratings not for ratings’ sake but to improve the quality of professional training so that education at our universities can be both useful and prestigious. Our economy needs professionals who are well-versed in global market processes and global economic and social trends, that are aware of the processes that occur in the technological development of humanity. It is important for us that not just Moscow universities but research centres in other regions participate in the rankings.
We have world-class universities. But we have little experience in promoting ourselves in the education market. Anglo-Saxon universities, for example, do a far better job. We should learn to promote our strengths.
To improve our ratings, we set up a council for improving the competitiveness of our leading universities. It comprises representatives of higher education, our science and business, and foreign colleagues.
We provide support to universities in the form of subsidies. Each university creates its own programme and sends it to the competition. From 2013 to 2015, 88 applications were filed and 21 universities became winners. Consequently, those universities received funds. In all, 30 billion roubles were allocated. This year, we have set aside 11 billion roubles in subsidies for universities.
The adopted measures have yielded certain results. The number of universities included in the overall global rankings has grown. As for ratings within majors, here our positions have also improved, and not just in majors where we have been traditionally strong, such as mathematics and physics, but in the last two years in the humanities as well. Many universities have improved their research results and the number of publications, the citation index has doubled since 2012.
Government Meeting
We will discuss a bill on changes to the law On Veterans. The case in point is granting combat operations veteran status to our citizens who were sent to Syria. You know that combat operations there were carried out successfully. This bill, once approved, will give them the social support that our other combat operations veterans are entitled to, which is fully justified.
We will examine a whole set of international documents, including the ratification of a convention aimed at fighting the dangerous affects of cancer-causing substances.
