I was recently in Moscow working on a small project, and so spent a couple of weeks mugging up on Russian higher education and its history.  My main takeaway is that there has never been a higher education system anywhere in the world that was more at the service of industry than that of the Soviet Union.

One of the very first Bolshevik documents on higher education (“On the work of the Higher School”, 1925), states this very clearly: “the basic task of higher educational establishments should be the training of workers for practical activity and production in the wide sense of the word in all its branches”.   Institutional entrance targets and curricula were all set centrally, in accordance with the needs of industry as set out in the National Plan.

Being at the service of industry led to significant institutional specialization.  Of the more than 700 post-secondary institutions in the Soviet Union in 1970, only 40 or so were actually “universities”.  The university appellation implied being top of the higher education prestige ladder (which in turn implied being one of the country’s older institutions, like St. Petersburg State University or Moscow State [Lomonosov] University, but which was only applied to institutions that taught humanities).  The rest were “polytechnics” (still relatively broad in terms of science and technology, but not full universities) or “specialist institutions”.  The specialist institutions were actually so specialized that they weren’t even under the control of the higher education ministry – institutions that trained doctors and nurses were under the Health Ministry, those dealing with veterinary or agricultural sciences were under the Agriculture Ministry, etc., etc.

For the most part, research was (and still is) handled outside universities, through many specialized academies were run centrally from Moscow and generally did not report to the Education Ministry.  The Soviets believed that researchers would be more productive in such institutes, and would be relieved of the burden of dealing with students every day (we do the same thing of course – we just label the practice differently).  Of the research conducted in higher education, roughly half came from the 40 universities, and the rest from the other 700 or so institutions.  This of course does not include what we today would call “applied research”, where the specialized institutes excelled – in many cases, they had experimental equipment directly incorporated into the factory floor to make knowledge transfer speedier.

Because institutions were so applied in their focus, graduates never had a problem finding jobs afterwards.  In fact, jobs for graduates were guaranteed – sometimes at the very factories where the students had done their applied research.  Towards the end of the Gorbachev period, the Soviet government tried to create a quasi-market in graduates, asking companies to pay universities 3,000 roubles per student rather than order them up for nothing from a central agency.  This failed miserably, though whether it was due to companies’ inherent cheapness or the fact that the Soviet economy was starting to tank at the time is unknowable.

It’s also worth noting that the late Soviet higher education system had something called “People’s Universities”, though the “university” in question was just any local group (and there were thousands of them) that decided to put on a free adult education class.  Though the classes were organized locally, there was a national infrastructure behind the course curricula, financed through the sale of pedagogical materials (mainly books used as course texts).  Some of these were professionally oriented (e.g courses on car manufacturing, targeted at industrial workers), and could count towards other certifications, but mainly the courses were personal interest affairs.  If that’s not a system of proto-MOOCs, I’m not sure what is.

MOOCs, differentiation, specialization, applied research, industry focus… sounds like a right-wing higher ed reformer’s paradise, doesn’t it?  Gwyn Morgan would have loved it.