COLUMNISTS

Mark H. Teeter

Ah, September 1st - Back to School Day in Russia and much of the world. For many adults, the onset of autumn evokes fond memories of academe and a better time in life. Much better, in fact: if you could pass occasional exams and scrounge enough money for room, books and pizza, you got a multi-year permit to finesse your country's armed services and the real world generally. It was called college, and you loved it.

Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin obviously did, waxing nostalgic at recent meetings with undergrads making their pizza money before the semester starts. Medvedev positively beamed in Sochi while telling student construction workers of earning "about 500 roubles" towards Leningrad State one summer as he watched nothing happen to the railroad cars he was "guarding". Putin, not to be outdone, claimed he once made 800 roubles at summer construction, then blew most of it at a Black Sea resort - an experience he now recalls "with pleasure", like any other ex-college party animal.

American politicians are no different, of course. George W. Bush fondly recalls "playing hard" - and not much else - as he blazed a trail of well-oiled indolence through Yale.

Barack Obama, while a more sober citizen, still remembers days of salsa dancing, late-night bull-shooting and occasional experiments with "controlled substances" - how else could you watch Columbia's football team? - as a very pleasant interlude.

Indeed, most Russians and Americans enjoy their time at Western civilisation's unique oasis between childhood and responsibility - but this September brings reason for both nations to be concerned. Higher education in Russia and the United States is dissimilar in many ways but alike in one: we both need to rethink how to pay for it.

Russia offers students both public and private institutions, neither of them economically stable and both plagued by validity problems. The underfunding of the state schools is legendary, and has pushed university specialists into private industry and abroad while encouraging corruption among those who remain. No one was surprised this spring when the Prosecutor General's Office cited college tutors among the top three "most crooked" professions in the country.

The new admissions system, using a single national exam, will eventually ease "front-door" corruption, presumably. But it won't end unequal access altogether, since universities may still admit state-privileged and cash-track students separately; and it won't do a thing about the serious "back-door" problems: the widespread sale of grades, theses and diplomas, which effectively renders most Russian college degrees suspect until proven otherwise.

At the same time, many of the post-Soviet private institutions are struggling: the crisis has meant serious enrolment shortfalls, as students opt for cheaper state schools or drop out altogether. Even with enough students, however, the non-state contingent still lacks the imprimatur of independent accreditation or a credible state-sponsored version of it, which may be a generation in coming ... for those still around to earn it.

In short, Russia seems uninterested in paying dearly for higher education and unconcerned about whether it can pay for itself. Is there a third way? Well, ask yourself this: Why is there no Abramovich University? Or a Gazprom State?

If Russian taxpayers are tapped out, why can't favoured oligarchs and major industries become founders of new Russian universities - as 19th-century American oligarch Leland Stanford and US state governments were - or at least hefty donors to the existing ones?

Americans, meanwhile, have reached a watershed of their own: after long leading the world in the proportion of college graduates, the United States now ranks seventh in the key 24-35 age group, with the decline owing largely to skyrocketing student costs.

Undergraduates are amassing tuition debt on a scale that approximates home mortgages - think about that - and the economic downturn has meant rising loan default and dropout rates. Private schools have seen their endowments shrink dramatically, and public universities face significant budget cuts from newly-parsimonious state legislatures.

The Obama administration wants to send in the cavalry via a Direct Loan programme which would make the federal government - not middleman private firms backed by taxpayers - the primary source of student loans.

A saving of $94 billion would be realised over a decade, with the money covering tuition costs of lower-income students. This and some related programme tinkering would effectively make higher education something akin to Medicare and Social Security: entitlements that Americans have long taken for granted.  

Can Congress enact such a sweeping, New Deal-type measure this fall? Will Russia's Solons - Medvedev and Putin - ask the wealthiest oligarchs and subsidised industries to save the nation's higher-educational bacon? Stay tuned.

"Knowledge is good," the fabled American philanthropist and college founder Emil Faber once sagely observed. He should have added, "But it's not a free lunch."

Mark H. Teeter teaches English and Russian-American relations in Moscow.