The decline in the number of young people in Russia will mean fewer students in higher education, and a reduction in the number of professors by about a quarter. This will require difficult decisions to be made, the rationale for which has not yet been decided on, with uncertain consequences.

Primary education in Russia has failed to adapt to the needs of post-Soviet society, and is still based on rote learning and memorization instead of learning through discovery and learning to use and apply what is learned.

Changes in educational policy in Russia will affect the proportion of young people who obtain their occupational qualifications in a university and in secondary-level professional training schools. There is currently a shortage of skilled blue-collar workers in Russia, and more needs to be done to ensure high-quality training for this sector of…

Human capital and the ability to innovate and to adapt to the demands of modernization are closely linked with levels of education, and especially of involvement in continuous education. A study of the situation in Russia suggests that for the immediate future it is more important for Russia's modernization development to give priority to catching…

Russia's future is put in jeopardy by a decline in both the size of the population and its health and human capital. There is an urgent need for policies to deal with this problem.

The "modernization" of Russian education is linked to the functioning of the entire social system of Russia, and reforms are proving difficult and contradictory. The use of the Unified State Examination in Russia, plus participation in the Bologna process, is causing concern about the ability of education to meet the needs of the…

The processes of modernization in this country's economy require a well-qualified work force that is mobile in social, professional, and geographic terms. The necessary basis of a successful solution to this problem is the stability of the family, which is the basic active agent of the reproduction of new generations of workers. Family stability…

Under the conditions of the market, the development of the economy must be of priority to the state, for the state cannot exist and be dynamic without such an economy and, consequently, there can be no question of any transformation of marriage, family relations, and the birthrate. A vital task in the development of the state has to do with…

According to data of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, in the 2006-2007 school year the number of daytime enrollment general education institutions was 58,500, with 38,600 of that number in rural areas. The total enrollment of all such schools was 14.3 million children, of which 4.4 million were in rural areas. From…

The demographic situation in the Russian Federation is characterized by a steady process of natural population loss; it began in 1992 and coincided with the economic crisis. To a partial extent the loss was made up for by migration, and by early 2008 the number of inhabitants of Russia declined to 142 million compared to 148.6 million in early…

The early 1990s were marked by the onset of a period of lengthy depopulation in Russia. A number of countries confronted a natural decline in population in the 20th century, in particular Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Sweden. What is specific to Russia, however, is that the depopulation relates to both components of…

The steady tendencies toward the decline in the size of Russia's population in the twenty-first century, owing to the effect of global political, social, and economic factors, are giving rise to a number of fundamental problems that have to do with the erosion of the conditions that are essential not only for the stable development of society, but…

The purpose of this article is to draw the attention of sociologists who are working in scientific institutions and instructors who are teaching in higher education, to the materials of the Russian National Census of 2002 as a significant source from which to obtain information about current problems of the sociology of education. The materials of…

The importance of a country's population as the carrier of its intellectual potential increases greatly in a postindustrial country, where the nation's intelligence, comprised of an aggregate of the intelligence of individuals, becomes the true engine and decisive factor of progress. Any loss of human resources in Russia, without regard to age and…

From 1992 through 2001, Russia lost more than 7 million people as a result of natural population loss or, with the positive migration balance taken into account, 4.7 million. These statistics show that the size of Russia's population is diminishing steadily. This article reports the findings of a study examining the factors that account for the…