Intelligence officials said that the Kremlin is offering Russians the chance to live, study and die on credit
Kyiv • UNN
Tuition at leading Russian universities costs up to 2 million rubles a year. Intelligence officials said that the Kremlin is shifting the funding shortfall onto students.
The rectors of three leading Moscow universities appealed to applicants, urging them not to be afraid to take out loans for higher education. As reported by the Foreign Intelligence Service, instead of acknowledging that education lacks funding, Kremlin administrators decided to shift this burden onto students’ shoulders, UNN reports.
The rectors of three leading Moscow universities — "MIPT," "MFUA," and "MSTU" — appealed to applicants, urging them not to be afraid to take out loans for higher education. The statement was not made by chance: this year’s university admissions campaign in the Russian Federation turned into a scandal when a significant share of school graduates with maximum Unified State Examination scores were unable to obtain state-funded places. Instead of acknowledging that education lacks funding, Kremlin administrators decided to shift this burden onto students’ shoulders
As the intelligence service noted, at first glance the idea was borrowed from Western experience. For example, at the University of Kansas, a graduate can indeed repay an education loan from their future salary without excessive hardship. But in Russian realities, the mechanism works differently. Tuition at leading universities in the Russian Federation already costs 1.5–2 million rubles per year, excluding food, accommodation, and transportation. Five years of such education amounts to a sum that most graduates will be unable to repay for many years, or even decades. For comparison: job openings for lawyers with no work experience, even in Moscow, offer 50,000–70,000 rubles per month, while the median market offer stands at 70,000–80,000 rubles.
In effect, with a single phrase, Kremlin rectors replaced the concept of accessible education with bank debt. This is not an isolated case: living on credit has recently become commonplace for Russians. Rising prices have affected even the funeral industry, where large companies offer installment plans for funerals for up to 12 months. This creates a logical, albeit horrifying, chain that the Kremlin is offering Russians today: finish school — take out a loan for education; die — go into debt again, this time for your own funeral. The only way the Kremlin officially offers Russians to escape this debt cycle is participation in the war against Ukraine