The Bologna process

Introduction

The article was current as of November 2011. It applies to researchers and engineers. Most likely it does not apply to doctors.

Today at school I met Evgeny, he teaches mathematics in the 5th-6th grades, and I teach physics in the 10th-11th.

Evgeny and I studied in parallel classes. Suppose that Mikhail and Alexey also studied with him.

After school all three at the same time entered St Petersburg University.

Will you be surprised if I say that none of them missed a single year, but now:

• Alexey is in the second year of his postgraduate studies
• Evgeny is in the first
• Mikhail is only finishing his master's degree

Just in case, I will repeat: no one was expelled, no one served in the army, no one took an academic leave. All three studied continuously.

If you were surprised, there is no reason to be - such a situation could arise, and I am sure it has arisen more than once, thanks to the Bologna system.

It would seem that the university is the same, yet they had to study according to completely dissimilar programmes.

Where does such a difference come from?

I will try to present my version briefly, but there will be a lot of letters.

Where the time goes

To answer this question we need to look into the past. I have a poor idea of how and whom they taught under the tsar.

But many of my relatives remember well how they taught in the USSR.

Five years of study → Specialist's diploma → Work at a research institute/postgraduate studies.

What we got in the 2000s with the transition to the Bologna system:

4 years of bachelor's studies + two or two and a half years of master's studies.

Six or seven years in total.

I write seven because if the goal is to enter postgraduate studies, then it makes no difference whether you study six and a half years or seven - you still have to wait for the end of the year.

For clarity, I will give a summary table for the possible study options.

I note that some faculties acted more wisely; for example, at the chemistry faculty you could choose whether to study for a specialist's degree or for a master's.

At the mathematics and mechanics faculty there were still specialist programmes when I entered the university.

The physics faculty stood out, as no alternative was offered there.

On behalf of all the students who lost two years for no known purpose, I would like to thank those functionaries who made the decision on wholesale master's programmes.

Why this happens

It is rather difficult to understand the general patterns that influence the duration of higher education in Russia.

On the one hand, they say on television that in our country the population is falling while qualified personnel are in short supply. All sorts of accidents happen there because of the incompetence of the staff and so on.

It would seem that these facts are in no way connected with each other. However, if you go deeper into the subject, the picture that emerges is depressing.

On the other hand, against the background of this demographic crisis, we end up with students entering full working life a year or two later.

There are no advantages at all from the point of view of the education received. If you want to advance science, you will have to go to postgraduate studies. The only bonus is easier emigration.

In postgraduate studies it does not matter whether you studied five or seven years before.

Loss of man-hours on a national scale

And now let us imagine for a second that every university graduate in Russia will lose one year of labour. From here I took the data on the number of students in Russia - there are 1.3 million of them.

That is, our country will lose 1.3 million «labour-years» every year, and, most interestingly, we are already losing a significant part of that number.

After all this, the government's talk about a shortage of personnel can be considered mockery.

Forbes and pensions

It is amusing what Forbes writes on the subject of pensions:

"Moreover, there are no objective arguments against raising the pension age for women, who live much longer than men.

And finally, the increase in the age at which working life begins, which we observe with each change of generations, means a reduction in the time that workers spend in the labour market."

There is a lot more there about pensions. They put it especially well about the growth of citizens' distrust of the state's actions on pensions. I think distrust of the state's machinations is already at the highest possible level here. There is no stability; everything is being turned, and will be turned, so that a group of persons can line their pockets at someone else's expense.

Even in the Forbes article the underlying idea is that a poor state does not know how else to save on pensioners. But what I want to write about is not this.

I draw attention to where the authors' thought is directed: raise the pension age of women because they live longer, since the age at which working life begins is rising.

UPD: About nine years after this article was published, the pension age was raised significantly. But the Bologna system was not abandoned until 2022.

What to do

From the beginning of the article it is obvious that lowering the age at which working life begins by at least a year is as easy as can be. I propose the solution right away: make master's programmes at universities 1.5 years long and bachelor's programmes 3.5 years long. That is, train the same specialists as before and give them an extra diploma for a term paper in the fourth year. No additional costs at all.

I see one drawback at once - for now (to me at least) it is not obvious where officials could embezzle on this (not in small ways, but on a large scale, as they like). Therefore, I am afraid there will be many more meetings at the top about how to live in a human way, so that everything possible can still be stolen and there is still money in the budget.

I will add, even though some figures will accuse me of PR and so on, that under the rector of St Petersburg University Kropachev, so hated by many, the seventh year of study at the physics faculty was nevertheless abolished starting with the 2012 graduating class.

UPD 2: in 2022 they started talking about leaving the Bologna system. I poorly understand why this should be done when one can simply shorten the study time. Apparently changing names gives someone pleasure.

Article author: Andrei Olegovich