Vladimir Putin signed a decree on a pilot project to change the levels of higher education, the corresponding document was published on the official portal of legal information.
The pilot project is going to be implemented on the basis of the Baltic Federal University, Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI), National Research Institute MISiS, Moscow State Pedagogical University, St. Petersburg Mining and Tomsk State Universities.
According to the presidential decree, in a trial format in 2023-2024 and 2025-2026 academic years, basic higher education will be introduced there — from four to six years , as well as master's programs in specialized higher education — from one to three years, depending on the direction and specialty.
Pilot project participants need to develop and approve new educational standards by June 30, 2023.
< p> The Minister of Science and Higher Education Valery Falkov, back in May 2022, announced plans to abandon the Bologna educational process, which “should be treated as a lived stage”, and to develop its own system of higher education. The same thesis was repeated in June by his deputy Petr Kucherenko.
A few days earlier, Deputy Minister of Science and Higher Education Dmitry Afanasiev said that Russian universities no longer participate in the Bologna process, since the monitoring group for the Bologna process suspended the representation of Russia and Belarus in the structures of the process due to the war in Ukraine. Later, the Federation Council compared the Bologna system with a vacuum cleaner, «which very actively allowed to pump smart people out of the Russian Federation.»