IGOR ARTEMIEV: EDUCATION DOES NOT NEED HIGH ENTRY BARRIERS

Head of the antimonopoly authority discussed the balance between accreditation and licensing, and problems of entry barriers to the market of educational services, speaking at joint expert meeting of the "Global Universities" Association and the Association of Leading Universities

The event took place on 11 May at National Research University "Higher School of Economics".

As Head of FAS pointed out, following the Order of the President of Russia on developing competition of 21 December 2017, a big Road Map is devised. One of its elements is developing competition in education and science. The State Council on changes to the competition development standards at the regional level, chaired by the President, gave significant attention to education.

"We must work a lot with the entry barriers to the educational market. At the moment, the system is not transparent and can be controlled only "manually". Other sectors do not have such archaic schemes of performance, accreditation and licensing; and just licensing remains. I would do the same with education, changing the rules. The point at issue is that we must make the new regulatory framework healthy and pro-competitive, with powerful control and supervision. We should decrease the number of procedures but make them more objective where possible", said Igor Artemiev.

"Once, the communications sectors had 8 licenses. We formed a single integrated license jointly with the Ministry of Communications and here as well, many current requirements should be checked for common sense. In the course of it, there should be fair competition. Competition between, for instance, 100-200 universities is much stronger and productive in terms of innovations and specific results than between 5000 universities. We should not chase numbers, opening an enormous number of universities in Russia", stated Head of the FAS Russia.