Search Page

The president of the Far Eastern Federal University has been arrested in what could be one of the largest corruption scandals in Russian higher education in the past quarter century. The university, located in Russia’s port city of Vladivostok employs over 3,000 faculty, enrols 33,000 students and has nine branch campuses in the region. The university is the flagship of higher education in the Far East and was intended to become a world-class research university.

An exposé in the Russian edition of Esquire has roiled education and health officials here by detailing the corruption at six medical schools. The magazine in April published nine short articles by medical students describing the various ways they can pay professors in exchange for passing tests.

According to Izvestiya Nauki, a corruption-monitoring team at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, university teachers took roughly $923 million in 2004. Some estimates indicate that corruption in universities is rising by 7-10 percent annually. The Highest School of Economics believes one out of ten university lecturers take bribes, and 20% of future students and their parents would be prepared to offer a bribe.

The rector of the Moscow State University of Culture and the Arts is alleged to have handed out 130 "false" law degrees between 2001 and 2004 in exchange for bribes worth RUR300,000. Estimates of how much students pay teachers and academics in bribes every year range from RUR250m to RUR300m.