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Russia's education watchdog revokes licenses of 100 universities, but has no black list

MOSCOW, December 25. /ITAR-TASS/. More than 100 Russian higher educational institutes have been excluded from the license register since September 2013, and in 2014 an additional inspection of all universities with signs of inefficiency will be carried out, head of the Federal Education and Science Supervision Agency (Rosobrnadzor) Sergei Kravtsov has said.

“As of today, more than 100 licenses have already been excluded from the register,” Kravtsov said in an interview published by the Izvestia daily on Wednesday. According to the official, the “methodical work of Rosobrnadzor, as well as the results of universities’ efficiency monitoring” that was launched in August 2013, had exerted “a certain influence on this result.”

“Although the criteria of monitoring and criteria of Rosobrnadzor inspections differ, most of the universities and their branches the licenses of which were revoked had inefficiency signs back in 2012,” Kravtsov said.

He said that the Ministry of Education and Science had issued two orders that determine the procedure of transfer of students from the universities, the licences of which had been annulled or suspended, to other higher educational establishments. In addition, the ministry has created an interdepartmental working group that will be looking after the situation with students.

Also, an information centre will be created in every RF region with a telephone hotline where each student from a “problem” university “will get information, legal and to a certain extent organizational assistance,” Kravtsov said.

“It is planned to put such a hotline into operation also at the federal level in January,” he noted.

Kravtsov stressed that Russia’s education watchdog did not have any targets for the closure of universities. “We don’t have any assignment or a black list,” the official said. “We perform the function of supervision and control of educational and scientific organisations, carry out scheduled and unscheduled inspections of their operation.”

“We have the task to establish order in the higher education system, and in 2014 we will inspect all the universities that have signs of inefficiency,” the Rosobrnadzor head said.

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