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Home > Policy > White Paper, Notice, Announcement > White Paper > JAPAMESE GOVERNMENT POLICIES IN EDUCATION,SCIENCE AND CULTURE 1990 > PART1 Chapter4 6 1

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PART 1 Issues and Perspectives ofHigher Education
Chapter 4 Higher Education in Other Countries
6 The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
1 Perestroika in Higher Education


Institutions of higher education in the USSR function as institutions, which are responsible for training specialists useful for the social and economic development of the nation based on the national plan, and for providing the retraining of workers to help them upgrade their qualifications. They are characterized by their function of providing high-quality professional education, rather than general education. These institutions can be classified into two categories: universities and specialized institutes. Universities train specialists in the various main sectors of science, as well as researchers and teachers. Each of them comprises several faculties. Specialized institutes include polytechnic institutes which train diverse specialists in various sectors of industry, and other institutes which train various specialists for certain sectors of the national economy and for the cultural sector.

Under the October Revolution of 1917, all institutions of higher education, which had been open only to a small number of privileged people, became public institutions open widely to the citizens. Since then, higher education rapidly developed. After World War 2, particularly in the 197O's and the 1980's, the Government carried out a policy for giving priority to workers in admission to higher education through increasing enrollments in correspondence courses and through other means.

As a result, the total number of higher education students, which was 2,400,000 in 1960, doubled by the beginning of the 198O's. In 1988, there were 69 universities and 829 specialized institutions and the total number of students enrolled in these institutions was approximately five million. As evening and correspondence courses have been widely disseminated, not less than 45% of all students are workers. The number of secondary school graduates advancing to higher education soon after the completion of a secondary school course accounts for 17% of all secondary school graduates.

Chart 1-4-6 Scale of Higher Education in the USSR

Meanwhile, since the beginning of the 198O's, a number of negative aspects of the higher education system have been exposed: the fragmentation of specialties; trends towards production-line education; the isolation of higher education from workplaces and from research institutes; overloaded curricula; the decline in the quality of students and teachers; and the shortage of physical facilities and equip-rent. The Government recognized that it would be difficult under the existing structures of higher education to develop such specialists as can adapt themselves to the changes and sophistication of science and technology, as well as of productive work.

Based on this recognition, as an integral part of its policies for social and economic reconstruction known as "perestroika", in March 1987, the Gorbachev administration set forth the Basic Guidelines for the Reform of Higher and Specialized Education in the USSR (the joint resolution of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers), which made it clear that the quality of higher education should be improved with the aim of ensuring the efficient development of manpower contributing to the acceleration of the social and economic development of the nation. With these guidelines, extensive reforms of the whole higher education system began to be undertaken. The reform efforts include: the qualitative expansion and quantitative improvement of full-time courses; a review of the number of places for each speciality with the aim of correcting the surplus or shortage of specialists; the improvement of teaching content and methods; the improvement of the living conditions of students; the improvement of the quality of teachers and their salaries; the democratization of the administration and management of institutions of higher education; and the introduction of doctoral courses with the aim of enhancing the training of researchers and prospective teaching staff at the postgraduate level. The Union Government has been striving to amend existing laws and regulations and introduce relevant laws and regulations so as to implement the above guidelines, while coping with various issues arising during the process of reconstruction in the different sectors of society.


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