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hello again and welcome to the spotlight then see the show on t.v. i'm al green of and today my guest in the studio is philip out. russia has been trying to improve the image of its higher education system in the world in particular it has started to question the efficiency of the most used university ranking systems finding some of them brought the subject. are these claims justified and why don't we have a rating that would shoot all we're asking philip out about who is the director of the center for international vij occasion at boston college. many world universities have an elite reputation but many more smaller and less known establishment and therefore less prestigious nevertheless with higher education being pretty expensive in russia which many fields are justifiable a growing number of students are going to regional establishments the russian

government has become more concerned about reforming its higher education system to make it fit into a pan-european structure it will allow students and teachers to become mobile and make the transfer of knowledge less problematic but as applied sciences get more investment some peer that the traditional theoretical side of fundamental science may shrink and the picture is true. welcome to the show thank you thank you very much for being with us well first of all how come that the moscow state university is the only uni in russia that's rated in the show rating and it's in the seventy six position well the shanghai rankings which are pretty objective but they only measure certain kinds of research and they only measure citations and the major western recognized international journals and they also measure how many nobel prize winners have been

educated at the university or especially on the faculty and they are these all up and that's where moscow state university came out so it's nobody's fault so you think of this is fair this is fair it's transparent it's objective. but it measures only one small aspect of what a university does russian universities are dissatisfied with the places they occupy and world rankings and question the criteria used by western rating agencies spotlights to me that i will have more. nervous so of and game this year's nobel prize winners both graduated from the moscow institute of physics and technology but you want to find it on the list the world's top universities russia's higher education officials claim the country is under represented in

international university rankings it's usually only the moscow state university which makes it through to the top one hundred and then it's down at the bottom of the list the major russian university has begun questioning the criteria used for the ratings it says the data used in the surveys is not always reliable numbers that it can go we pointed out a mistake one of the region agencies and after it had been corrected we were up fifty points because of just one mistake which means there must be always the right to go for a university to lodge an appeal of living near the moscow state universities doing a number of unique things it launches satellites into outer space and possesses a supercomputer able to make five hundred trillion operations a second but it's quite different things which are taken into account when compiling during games like the number of nodes about laureates on the university

board or the number of publications unscientific jools with the moscow state university schooling food isn't a flexible and objective system of brain gain if russian graduates are welcome to do post-graduate research in major european and american universities the system of higher education in russia cannot be that bad. well as far as i understand these so-called citation index and you me you you mentioned it before is the main instrument to measure the cheeseman scientists does it make english i mean the english language a key to to to success in the world recognition yes it does without any question english is the world language of science today most scientific research is published in journals which are published in english and largely in the united states and the u.k. australia. canada to some extent and so it definitely does privilege and maybe

a little bit unjustifiably so those journal those countries would use english as their first language however the fact is in the world english is the language of science and international scientific communities i suppose including russian one. need to take that into account many world universities strongly emphasized that their faculty members should publish articles in these journals and even reward them for that in china they do writing in english writing in english and publishing in these recognised international journals korea china some in american countries of emphasize. the importance of these international journals because they are objectively. edited and are sort of recognized as the gold standard for scientific research well but if we take into account that there are

dozens of young scientists that write in russian study and russian and maybe maybe they don't know english maybe they just don't care maybe for them it's more important to carry out their research than to do the translation so do you think that there are russian universities and high schools institutes that deserve higher rankings that they have today. how i would answer that question is i think there are russian universities were to do excellent scientific work for the russian language community and in that respect to have a national scientific community is very important maybe even the most important thing but if you want to play in the big leagues you have to abide by the rules of the big leagues and russia does not control those those rules neither does china knight of those any country. and it's widely recognized globally almost everywhere that these international journals largely in english not exclusively are the gold

standard and are the ones that get the measure to say problems. in france is yes true and the french authorities including the present how do they cope with it they are unhappy. but how they cope with that is they try to get more of their their professors and their scientists to publish in the international journals and so on now i should point out that the times higher education ranking which in my view is the other one which is reasonably objective among the three or four international rankings does measure other things that then the only citations when they measure out whether this should be my next question what are the main criteria you know the times higher education which i think has done a pretty good job of trying to bring in other aspects and maybe the russian higher education system can learn something from what they measure budget they measure.

ph d. numbers on their faculties with a measure of the output of doctoral doctoral research students they measure internationalization that is how many international students are coming to europe to the particular university. they they measure the amount spent per student and a number of other things and i must say from my brief observations here in russia most of the russian universities that i don't know anything about are making progress in these areas but when compared to the major western institutions and i think when compared even to the top institutions in china and korea and japan. that they are not spending as much as those others are not investing as much in internationalization of the institutions they have fewer international students on

their campuses and by a number of the measures which are recognized as important they're not doing as well frankly when using this nation index ok i agree that it's very well maybe it's the most important thing but any english magazine. scientific magazine published in english is translated into other languages and i think and i think i would guess that at least fifty percent of its readers read it in their own language not in english i mean the entrance ration where at least for them english is a foreign language so do they do they use do they do they really cite the the non english magazines when these in quotation marks. first of all are the top scientific journals we're not talking about popular magazines looking for the same knowledge of science. to. they are not translated i mean they are only in

english and scientific community around the world is expected to read them in english some of them do get translated into some of the bigger languages russian chinese spanish a few others but largely global science in the beginning of the twenty first century is maybe unfortunately an english media. development and it's changed from fifty years ago when there was there when there were more national scientific communities and when for example french and german german was being very important and scientific research but nowadays english is just recognised as the language of science now but doesn't mean it's the language of intellectual discourse around the world it isn't and it doesn't mean that journals of opinion and of intellectual life and so on. are not in other languages

and many of them as you pointed out are in fact translated around the world in different languages but does that mean that the developing countries and do they really have a capacity to to to be equals the global the global educational marketplace it's a big problem for them and it creates barriers to. increases in the rankings. because they are forced to publish in english not only that but the the the western science english dominated scientific community uses our methodologies as westerners they focus on the kind of science that's relevant to us which may not be relevant to developing countries or for that matter a developed and important country like russia which has its own scientific traditions says director of the center for international higher education philip

outback spotlight we'll be back shortly right after a break we'll continue this interview so stay with me all right.

welcome back to spotlight time now going off in just a reminder that my guest in the studio today is philip algebra director of the center for international higher. education mr about well you mentioned france and germany who used to be very competitive in higher education what about today our countries are other than english speaking our universities other than english speaking countries still competitive absolutely where could france and germany still some more rounds what about outside the western world yes several of the important chinese universities have recently risen up in the rankings by the way i

think we emphasize too much the rankings. i do realize that there's a lot of people who are quite critical of them in russia and for fairly good reasons but i think russians and for that matter french and germans who are also upset about the fact that some of their universe their very good universities are not ranking very well worry too much about it my own view is that universities in particular countries should do what they do best and worry about their national communities function globally but in a way act locally. and what's and what's most important is the people they're training and educating in their own countries so. nonetheless we do function in a global world and universities around the world do compete with one and with with one another for international students for grants for foundations support for image for prestige. and in that respect russia is not doing as well as it might and for

that matter france and germany and some other countries with very distinguished academic traditions like this country are also not doing as well however in most of those countries in japan in hong kong in mainland china in singapore for as examples their universities are come. thing up and russia needs to worry about not only the americans and the canadians and the australians but the universities in those emerging countries to which are investing very heavily i think one of the problems in russia is that there isn't enough sustained investment in the higher education sector particularly those are the top class universities the well known the new national research university vestment as you mention is one of the factors that's also also rated yes yes well we now may add

a chance to see if moscow think that there are enough skilled professionals in their country spotlights eladio on that has the details on that. i there today i'll try to find out if muscovites think that there are more than enough people in this country with higher education on the contrary there's a shortage of them as well as the i think there's a shortage of people with higher education in our country now it's very difficult today to get a higher education in russia because people have to pay for it it's very expensive and not everybody can afford it because every one knows that i think there are plenty of people with higher education in our country however there aren't enough skilled specialists education is corrupt in our country. because. i think there are more than enough people with higher education our country i think our education system should be more focused on a workforce. that is because i think there are many people in russia with higher education at the moment however for the most part this issue cation is humanitarian

and i think there is an excess of these people today they are not included in the real sector and that's why our country needs to focus more on an education which can provide for this real sector. out i've got to go to you're going to question our guest. do you think the russian higher education corresponds to the world standards. does it yes or no well if we don't take the ratings which you said we shouldn't overestimate so does it correspond in the u.s. you know years ago yes or no you said yes and now yes and i know it's not enough because russia though some things very well russia actually provides access to its young people kids coming out of high school at one of the highest rates in the world so there are lots of russians the spite what some of those people who are actually getting entry to post-secondary institutions so i think russia does pretty

well at that russia does less well that's the top of the system that has its universities and the rankings are of. some indication of that. doesn't do as well at the very top so all higher education mass higher education systems big ones are kind of like a pyramid with a small elite sector like moscow state university the higher school of economics here in moscow st petersburg university and others but most of the universities are low or lower in the rankings and i don't know enough to say how russia is doing in terms of quality in the mass system but it's doing pretty well in terms of access in the masses to one of the interviewees was talking about cost generally speaking russian higher education by most global standards is pretty reasonably priced

so they shouldn't complain. but the salaries in russia a different to those in the united states of roaring glints out there so so you should comparative to the average south course ok now listen we heard those two nobel prize winners this year who both the firsts all the first interviews that they gave they praised their out on the matter at the university they graduated from but they're both live in what it can handle and so many russian university graduates go to work abroad now do you think that russia should try to hold them keep them at home or let them go well you have to let them go you have clothes who are in a global academic environment and the old days of trying to keep people know i mean i knew to force them but we're trying to create conditions so they stayed where i mean it makes no sense yes. yes russian higher education

should create the conditions to keep their best scientists and brains in the country no question about that. when it doesn't compare in terms of the working conditions for the top scientists in terms of the sell restructures for the top scientists in terms of the laboratory facilities for the top scientists they will leave. the same thing is true by the way for china china has the same and japan even japan many of the nobel prize winners who were educated graduated from japanese universities are working in the united states or the united kingdom or canada why salaries are better conditions are better they have more independence of for their scientific work it's very simple we live as part of a global war scientific work force today i wish russia. and i hope

russia will have the conditions to keep its best scientists in the country only ask you something more and my sister in law lives in canada and her little daughter and she's fifteen years old she goes to school and she says that the only kids in canada who really study at school and in the universities are russians indians and chinese that is just an lazies not true that i don't think there is some truth of that everywhere this would be true in the united states as well immigrants who have a strong educational tradition like the three of their post immigrants one anyway and the three that you mention do well in school no question if you look at who wins the the american spelling bees how little. you lympics of spelling their indian kid basically one of them so yes but it's also true there are a lot of. native canadians are no longer canadians or local americans who go to

very good high schools and do very well in university as well. well you mentioned the highest sector of the pyramid we in russia call it the elite education the elite schools colleges the elite universities should there be such a thing as elite education and lead students and lead tutoring or no there should be no longer geisha as well it's it's rewarding talent and really well daddy's money. it is there should be conditions so that bright kids no matter what their economic background or for that matter in some societies racial or ethnic backgrounds have the chance to excel it so happens if you look at any sociology text the rich do better because their

parents care about education because they have more money to spend on schools are told reserved so on so they do better than other sections of the society nonetheless. in an inner knowledge society you have to have top institutions you have to have an elite sector and of course the best thing is to have as democratic an elite sector as possible so that the opportunity for advancement is there for everybody not just the regional issues of the lead but we should call a democratically democratically no doubt. like a democratic ok getting back to the very beginning about the bear the the the rankings the english system should russian universities schools and high schools try to stave elop education in english to rise the international attractiveness of the russian the educational system or not that's a very good question only russians can answer that question mark my own view and if

you look at a number of non english speaking countries japan korea china. some in latin america there germany even france which has such a strong interest in its own language there are now programs in their universities in english sure russia. emulate some of those programs and have some programs in english i think yes but mainly to attract international students to russia thank you thank you very much the reason i asked is that the russians tried to call their card which used to be called. they called it larder it didn't help thank you thank you very much for being with us just a reminder that my guest was director of the center for international higher education philip out of iraq and that's it for now from all of us here will be back until then stay on r.t. and take care thank you for that.

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