Chinese universities were not very important in the beginning of the economic reform, because they were undersized with very few students and a lot of the university professors were underpaid. In 1977, China was just emerging from the Cultural Revolution. All the university facilities at this time were downsized, damaged, and so on. During this period, Deng Xiaoping, who was the leader of the reform movement, started a new initiative. Since then, China’s universities have expanded their importance and their influence. University professors are getting paid much better than before and we now have a much larger body of graduate and undergraduate students...

Such an assumption sounds unpersuasive. Absolutely all educational reforms carried out in the country in recent years embody the realisation of proposals put forward by the State University-Higher School of Economics (HSE). Notably, these reforms were carried out by the government that is criticised by MSU – recall, for instance, the Unified State Exam (USE) at the very least. It is hard to imagine that such critics belongs to a structure, which you imagine as positioning itself as presenting the ideology of the ‘party in power’ and, on the contrary, that the lobbying of these reforms is realised without its support...

With all its drawbacks, the educational system of Russia is good namely because it takes into consideration individuals’ needs. Nowadays, the fact is that people attend universities and this means that this institution possesses real social weight. Any attempts to turn a person against higher education are doomed to failure..