Russia's Future: Our Self-appraisal Very Low

In several weeks graduates from Russian higher education institutions will get their high-school diplomas and enter the labor market
Over the first years of reforms carried out in this country we all got used to the sad fact that there are just few graduates who get employment corresponding to the qualification they obtain at institutions of higher education. The Russian Ministry for Industrial Science held a special poll among graduates of the leading university of the country, the Lomonosov Moscow State University last autumn. According to the poll, the situation with the correspondence between qualifications and employment of graduates is still poor.

To thirds of the Moscow State University graduates say they agree to accept employment with the starting wage at the rate of $300-500, at the time when 10% of them would be satisfied with a smaller sum. At that, the financial needs of the mechanics and mathematics department of the University (lots of today's bankers graduated from the faculty in the 1990s) turned out to be the most decent.

The Center for Scientific Research and Statistics reports that average monthly wage in scientific institutions was lower than $200 last year. This is one of the reasons why graduates often agree to start some other trades, not those obtained at the university. 

Russky Fokus