Universities are being reprogrammed - Newspaper Kommersant No. 181 (7382) of 09/30/2022

Universities are being reprogrammed - Newspaper Kommersant No. 181 (7382) of 09/30/2022



At Russian universities, the number of departments opened by foreign IT companies that left the country due to sanctions has decreased. Their programs covered up to 30% of students of technical faculties. Russian business can replace departed vendors by opening their own areas, experts say, but in the current situation they are unlikely to allocate comparable funding: a return on investment in education is often unattainable in the short term.

The departure of Western companies from the Russian market, which began due to military operations in Ukraine, affected Russian universities: additional departments that were opened by such foreign companies as Microsoft, IBM, etc., ceased to exist. Kommersant was told about this in the InfoWatch Group of Companies. The company clarified that Western companies taught a number of IT areas at Russian universities, which were integrated into training programs. For example, Apple and Android helped train students in mobile development, IBM in the field of programming, Oracle was involved in cloud services training, SAP was involved in enterprise management systems, and so on, Andrey Zarubin, vice president of InfoWatch Group for science and education, said. According to him, such departments covered about 10-30% of students, depending on the university, potentially preparing them for work in their companies.

Universities and institutes themselves do not explicitly confirm the problem, referring to the fact that “they have long since refocused on Russian partners,” and with the departure of Western ones, only highly specialized laboratories have suffered. The Phystech School of Applied Mathematics and Informatics (FPMI) at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology reported that they had carried out “certain rearrangements” in partners, but the educational program remained the same. Among the Russian companies acting as partners, Andrei Raigorodsky, director of the FPMI, named Yandex, Sbertech, Tinkoff, 1C, etc.

NUST MISIS said that the Huawei ICT Academy has been operating on the basis of the university since 2015, in 2021 more than 400 university students received company certificates. The institute also cooperates with VK, Sberbank, and others. An interlocutor close to Moscow State University told Kommersant that only laboratories existed on the basis of specialized faculties, in the structures of which there were changes, but insignificant. The Ministry of Education and Science reported that within the framework of the federal project “Development of the personnel potential of the IT industry”, “digital departments” have been created, thanks to which students will be able to simultaneously receive additional competencies in the IT field - “more than 110 thousand students are enrolled in“ digital departments ”of 114 universities ".

With a competent organizational approach to working with universities and a sufficient budget, you can build an effective system of work with students and provide yourself with staff in the long term, says Victoria Pluzhnikova, head of Auriga employer brand promotion. The IW Group estimates the time for students to study at three years: two and a half years of theoretical training, three months of study at a specialized academy and three months of practice.

But in the process of replacing foreign partners, there will be difficulties, including with the material and technical base, which foreign companies provided for the work of their departments. “Now domestic developers will have to take over this provision, maybe somehow agree and share the costs. The state, in theory, should get involved and subsidize the purchase of the necessary "iron",” said Lev Matveev, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Serchinform.

The main stumbling block in the operational creation of departments and laboratories, alternative to foreign ones, is finances, Andrey Zarubin notes. “Such a scope of work with universities and educational materials of such quality that students were provided by Western vendors are far from affordable for all domestic IT companies, and the return on investment in education is often unattainable in the short term,” he says. Taking into account the fact that the planning horizon has been reduced as much as possible, the expert says, in the current situation, most companies will either not launch academic programs at all, or will try to reduce their costs as much as possible, which will affect their efficiency.

Tatyana Isakova



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