Russian universities are interested in increasing the number of foreign students. Today an average value to pass monitoring of the Ministry of Education and Science is 4% of the total number of students.

The day before the Agency of city news “Moscow” held a press conference on “Effectiveness of work of Admissions committees, quality of applicants, popularity and competitiveness of different areas of education, nature of new academic programmes”.

These topics were discussed by the heads of Moscow universities: the rector of the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI Mikhail Strikhanov, the first Vice rector of the Higher School of Economics Vadim Radaev, the rector of Moscow State Pedagogical University Alexei Semenov, the rector of the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics Viktor Grishin, the rector of Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology Dmitry Zubtsov.

MEPhI rector focused on issues related to the increase in the number of foreign students in Russian universities. He noted that MEPhI shows quite high indicators in this area.

MEPhI is a participant of the state program “Global education”, one of the main criteria of which is percentage of foreign students. “Following the results of 2014 the University is ranked 8th out of 15 Russian universities participating in this project”, Mikhail Strikhanov said. Now the University enrolls about 800 foreign students. “We have committed to move to the 5th place. It means that the number of foreign students will be about 12 per cent from the total number”, he said.

“Nuclear University is specific”, MEPhI rector said. “We follow successful Russian State Corporations – Rosatom and Rostec. We create educational programs in countries where industrial facilities are constructed. Now we have 12 countries in the portfolio: Among them there are Turkey, Vietnam, Argentina, Jordan. The second package includes all space of the CIS”, Mikhail Strikhanov said.