From Republic, Sept. 3, 2026, https://republicmag.io/posts/118046. Condensed text:

Editors’ Note. – While taking part in the plenary session of this year’s Eastern Economic Forum on Sep. 3 [see the second feature in this issue], [Russian President] Vladimir Putin was asked why schools “basically force students to quit after the ninth grade” Putin replied, “Honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” . . .

In this article, Leonid Spirin, editor in chief of Groza [Thunderstorm], an online magazine for college students, explains for our readers – and for Vladimir Putin – how the education system in Russia is swiftly adapting to wartime needs.

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Why is it so difficult to score enough points for a tuition waiver?

In recent years, with Russia engaged in a full-scale war [in Ukraine], the authorities have been doing everything possible to reduce the number of young people entitled to a multiyear deferment from military service. This may explain a recent comment by Science and Higher Education Minister Valery Falkov: “Why are we, including university rectors and myself, not alarmed by this perfectly healthy trend where more people are choosing vocational training over college education? Not everybody needs a college degree. I repeat, considering our current situation on the labor market, there is absolutely no need to send every young person to college.” Falkov said this at a forum called “HR Expo Pro/About People” – a name reminiscent of an old film by Aleksei Balabanov, [“About Freaks and People”].

Part of the reason behind this trend is simply because there are more graduates in 2026. This is because of the baby boom in the 2000s, the “decade of prosperity.” The young people enrolling in college today were born in 2007 or 2008, when 1.61 million and 1.71 million children were born in Russia, respectively. (Compare this with the mere 1.21 million children born in 1999, one of the lowest numbers in years). In fact, competition will only get worse a few years from now, because 2012 through 2014 were the peak years in terms of the birth rate in Russia.

It is true that the government increased the number of state-funded places in universities in 2026, but these added seats can by no means satisfy increased demand. Besides, part of this increase is illusory: Out of 1,500 tuition-free spots added, 1,000 were reserved for universities in occupied Ukrainian territories. At the same time, the number of young people who took the Unified State Exam (USE) this year went up by 68,000, reaching 750,000. (Of course, not everyone who took the test in 2026 graduated this year, but still, the discrepancy between these two numbers is staggering.)

Next, there has been an obvious shift in how these tuition-free spots are distributed among various fields of study. The number allocated to the humanities, which has always been the most popular field of study, was slashed. Engineering, on the other hand, receives 42% of all state-funded places, with another 1,200 places added this year. Because of that, prospective students and their parents face a dilemma: On the one hand, it seems that their chances of getting into a STEM-focused university would be higher; on the other hand, this would mean taking the USE in physics, which is more difficult. A test in history or literature might be easier, but you would have to ace it in order to get in.

Russia clearly needs drone engineers more than it needs political scientists, and Vladimir Putin openly admits this in his public comments. Meeting with participants in the Leaders of Russia program, Putin acted surprised to learn that political science is an actual science. “Is political science a real science or not? It’s a tough question. Traditionally, the criteria have been as follows: For a field of study to be recognized as a science, it has to have a separate object of study and its own method of study. With political science, it is hard to point out a method of study that would be unique to it,” Putin said.

Indeed, who needs political scientists in a country that has no competitive elections and no participatory politics? Engineers, on the other hand, are in demand, and Putin regularly mentions that Russia needs more of them.

Simultaneously, a growing number of people are enrolling in universities through a special quota for war veterans and their family members. This is the first year that this factor has had a major effect on the overall situation with admissions. Universities are required to reserve 10% of their government-funded spots for war veterans. This year, 41,000 people enrolled at universities through this entitlement, using up 73% of the quota. (In 2023 and 2024, only 15% of the quota was used.) These people are admitted without any tests and irrespective of competition from other applicants.

While in the past this benefit only applied to war veterans and their children, the list was extended this year to include the widows of those killed in the “special military operation (SMO).”

But even that is not the biggest problem with the quota for veterans. The thing is, each university has a certain number of spots reserved for special categories of people (for instance, applicants with disabilities). In the past, if some of these reserved spots weren’t taken in a particular year, the university would return them to the general admissions pool and pick the best applicants to fill them. But in 2026, universities started offering these remaining spots to war veterans first. Other applicants can only compete for these spots if there are not enough veterans to fill them all. As a result, there are a number of schools (naturally, the most prestigious ones) where, for the first time, veterans took up more than 10% of all government-funded spots this year. For example, Novaya gazeta Europereported that over 4,300 young people enrolled at Russia’s top 18 schools through the veteran quota.

Why are tuition fees so high?

Just like everything else in Russia, education is getting more costly. But what is worse, universities are now required to operate basically as if they were parts of a planned economy. In the past, universities were free to decide on their own how many fee-paying spots they wanted to have in each department. Now, the government makes that decision. As a result, the overall number of paying spots was reduced by 47,000. The departments affected the most include law schools (14,000 fewer paying spots, a reduction of 17.9%), business administration (7,400 fewer paying spots, a reduction of 17.1%) and economics (7,300 fewer paying spots, a reduction of 15.6%). Again, the authorities are justifying this decision based on the “current situation on the labor market” and because they want to improve the quality of higher education.

In the meantime, tuition fees have been going up every year. According to the Education Ministry, they grew by an average of 10.7% in 2026, which is double the official inflation rate. This number is somewhat misleading for two reasons. First, using a national average means you fail to make a distinction between, say, [prestigious Moscow schools like] Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Higher School of Economics and much smaller, second-rate colleges in places like Kurgan or Chita. Second – and more importantly – while in the past low-income families had their ways of coping with high tuition fees (you could take out a student loan or ask your school to reduce your tuition fee due to financial constraints), the authorities have been shutting down these opportunities lately, and if you major in something the government does not need, you won’t have access to these alternatives.

For certain majors, tuition fees went up by 20%-40%. According to RBC, fees for the programs offered by the Institute of Nuclear Physics and Engineering at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute went up by 48%. Tuition at Bauman [Moscow State] Technical University went up by 18.75% on average, while tuition at the Nuclear Physics department at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology went up by 32.3%, exceeding 1.1 million rubles a year.

Here is a very vivid example of how Russian universities handle the issue of financial aid packages. On April 23, 2026, the rector of the Higher School of Economics, Nikita Anisimov, issued an order saying that tuition could only be reduced during the first year of study, and then only by 25%. In the past, students at the Higher School of Economics could have their tuition reduced by up to 70% for the entire duration of their studies. Fees at the Higher School of Economics vary from major to major, but the average fee is around 1 million rubles a year. The university described the decision to slash financial aid as a “modernization effort.”

One Groza reader – the father of a 2026 graduate –says that it makes no difference what you spend your money on: private tutors or a contract with a university: “My daughter finished school this year. We live in Moscow. She was interested in humanities. What surprised me the most in this whole admissions business is the gap between the points you have to score in order to get a tuition waiver and the points that get you a paying spot. If you score over 300 points, you can hope that you might get into a government-funded spot. However, as long as you are willing to pay, you can easily get into the very same school with less than 200 points. We spent over 1 million rubles on private tutors during the last two years of high school, and then it turned out that all this money was spent for nothing, because, on the one hand, my daughter was never going to score over 300 points anyway, and, on the other hand, she would have scored 180 even without tutors. In the end, she scored 220 points, and this was enough to get her a paying spot at Lomonosov Moscow State University, the People’s Friendship University [of Russia],the Russian State University for the Humanities, or Moscow State Linguistic University. All of these schools were ready to take us in with a score of 220. Naturally, we picked Lomonosov Moscow State University. The cut-off score for paying spots was 228 in foursubjects; the cut-off score for government-funded spots was 370. In other words, it doesn’t make any difference if you score 369 or 229. I hope you understand that 140 points for four subjects is a huge gap. So, basically, if you know you will never score over 300, you don’t need to prepare for tests, because you can get in anyway, as long as you are willing to pay.”

In the past, Russia had relatively cheap (3% annual percentage rate) student loans, which somewhat helped families to cope with high tuition fees. This year, the authorities removed 37 majors from the list of bachelor and specialist programs eligible for low-interest loans: law, economics, business administration, journalism, psychology, linguistics, etc. The logic is that since the government has decided to reduce the number of paying spots for a particular major, it shouldn’t offer subsidized loans for these majors, either. In other words, if you live in Russia in 2026 and you want to be a journalist or a psychologist, you need to either ace your standardized test or have very wealthy parents.

One can easily see what effect all these measures have.

High school students are being pushed to enroll at vocational and technical schools to get a secondary vocational education.

This policy is yielding results. In 2025, 63% of ninth grade graduates went to a vocational or technical school instead of completing high school. This is an all-time high. (Just a few years ago, this figure was below 50%). Young people – along with their parents – are afraid that they won’t be able to get into a university in two years. At the same time, school teachers encourage – and, in some cases, almost force – them to quit after ninth grade and go to a vocational school. In addition, high schools have been consistently reducing the number of spots in 10th and 11th grades. Advancing to 10th grade is now almost as big of a challenge as getting into college. Here is what Irina Lukyanova writes about this in her essay in Novaya gazeta Europe: “Every year, schools reject many of their ninth grade graduates, refusing to let them stay on and move up to 10th grade. The reasons they cite for this include the student’s ranking; their individual capabilities, their Basic State Exam results, high competition for specialized programs, the [school’s] lack of the required specialization, or the lack of spots.”

Our source at Groza – a teacher working at a vocational school in one of Russia’s provinces – confirms that parents increasingly view secondary vocational education as a reasonable compromise: “Everything they do is for this purpose [i.e., to make high school students choose vocational education – Trans.]. They even make it extremely easy to get into vocational training. If you pick a working-class profession – say, electrician – you only have to take two tests: Russian and mathematics. Some of the kids that come to us have actually completed 11 years of school but failed to get into college. I can’t give you an accurate estimate, but we have quite a few kids like that. For example, nine students who had completed 11 grades were added to a class of 23 students. So, the number of students keeps growing. At the same time, the school does not have enough teachers, and many teachers decided to quit. In addition, there is simply not enough room in the school building for all these students. The workload has increased, but our salaries remain the same.

“The most interesting thing is that we have lots of kids whose fathers went to the SMO. If your father is fighting in the SMO, you will get in no matter what. But recently, I saw something I’ve never seen before – we had an entire class of kids whose fathers were fighting in Ukraine. Because of that, we don’t always have enough spots for other applicants. In other words, even vocational training isn’t easily accessible any longer.”

Why is the government driving young people into vocational schools? The answer is very simple. It is all because of military service.

If you go to a vocational school, you get a deferment from conscription the same way you get it in college. But under Russian law you are only entitled to one deferment for the purposes of education. In other words, vocational school graduates who enroll in college do not receive another deferment from the college. This is important because education at vocational schools takes less time than bachelors’ programs in universities, and young people get into vocational schools earlier, right after ninth grade. Besides, the education process can drag on for many years: Having completed a bachelor’s program, many students apply for a master’s program, and then for a candidate or a doctoral program. (The number of graduate students has surged in Russia in recent years, but few of them succeed in defending their dissertations.) As a result, vocational or technical school graduates aged 18 to 20 are easy targets for conscription centers.

Back in Soviet times, education was always hailed as a virtue, starting with Lenin’s literacy campaign. To “become a person,” the child of Soviet parents had to obtain a diploma – that is, graduate from any university. College graduates in the Soviet Union were guaranteed a job assignment and a relatively decent salary. Naturally, it wasn’t easy to get into a prestigious university. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, college admissions became akin to Russian roulette. Apart from being a stepping-stone to a higher status through learning and professional growth, a college education now carried additional value as it offered a deferment from military service. The two Chechen wars in Russia’s contemporary history solidified this perception of higher education as a “get out of jail free” card. At the same time, higher education lost much of its original appeal in the 1990s, as people with college diplomas often had to work as street vendors to make ends meet. As a result, many Russians began to view a college education primarily as a way to dodge military service.

Today, the government uses numerous methods to discourage young people from getting a higher education. Simultaneously, the education system itself is becoming increasingly militaristic. So, Russian high school students are faced with a tough choice: Either they learn how to design drones, or they learn how to launch those drones in the combat zone.