Skip the exam and grab a rifle: Russia is making higher education less accessible — The Insider
As the number of tuition-paying places shrinks, the cost of studying continues to climb. According to the Education and Science Ministry’s figures, average tuition fees across Russia rose by 10.7% in 2026.
The increases have been even steeper at elite universities. According to RBC, annual tuition for the economics department at the Higher School of Economics rose by 30%, from 770,000 rubles in 2025 to 1 million rubles. Law increased by 35%, from 520,000 to 700,000 rubles. At the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), the sharpest increase was for “Economics: Entrepreneurship and Business Performance Management,” where annual tuition rose from 600,000 to 750,000 rubles. At Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, “Economics and Business Planning” increased from 530,000 to 695,000 rubles, while at Moscow State University, annual tuition for economics rose from 750,000 to 900,000 rubles.
According to education specialist Igor, some universities have even raised tuition retroactively for students already enrolled: “The contracts allow for indexation, but it used to be considered bad form to actually enforce it. Now many universities are doing exactly that. HSE and RANEPA have also abolished all of their old tuition discounts, replacing them with a single new one that’s less generous.”
Igor believes one objective of the current reforms is to strip universities of their remaining financial autonomy. During a working group preparing the reforms, he says, officials openly argued that “the leading universities need to be brought to heel.” In his view, that is why the reforms are being imposed through mandatory directives that even the country’s top institutions cannot ignore. “August will be the moment of truth. In the past, if more fee-paying students enrolled than originally planned, universities were allowed to increase their admission quotas. We’ll see what happens now.”
For students unable to secure one of Russia’s increasingly scarce scholarship places, there is another option: more and more Russians are enrolling at Chinese universities. In the 2024-25 academic year, the number of Russian citizens studying in China reached 21,000.
A Moscow family originally from the Russian Far East, whose son graduated from high school this year, told The Insider that they are sending him to Dalian Polytechnic University to study business administration: “It’s affordable and the quality is good. The campuses are excellent. The first year is devoted to learning the language, and at the end there are two exams — mathematics and Chinese — after which students move into the first year of the degree program. Tuition costs 10,400 yuan a year (about 120,000 rubles, or $1,535), and the dormitory is another 6,400 yuan (about 73,500 rubles or $941).”
According to the same HSE statistical yearbook, the average tuition for one semester at a private Russian university is 73,700 rubles ($943), compared with 95,000 rubles ($1,216) at a public university. By that measure, studying in China can actually be cheaper. More importantly, there is no Unified State Exam (EGE), no compulsory “mentorship” program after graduation, and no risk that a chosen degree program will suddenly be abolished as “unnecessary for the labor market.”