The opportunity to find an interesting and well-paid job, a comfortable socio-cultural environment, and friendly and professional contacts in the new location are all essential factors for graduates of universities from Russian regions who are planning to move to another city. Saida Ziganurova , Research Assistant at the HSE Center for Institutional Studies, studied the migration potential among young professionals.
On September 14 2015, Dr Alina Sorgner will give a talk at the annual meeting of the HSE Laboratory for Entrepreneurial Research on 'Does Entrepreneurship Pay? Empirical Analysis of Incomes of Self-employed, as Compared to Wages of Paid Employees'. Ahead of her visit to HSE Moscow, the young academic gave an interview to HSE English News Service about variations in entrepreneurship in post-communist countries and about her cooperation with HSE.
Educational media is expanding rapidly in Russia, while scientists are giving more lectures on popular science to packed auditoriums and more scientific festivals are taking place than ever before. But do these efforts actually pay off? As part of a monitoring survey on innovative behaviour in Russia, experts from the HSE Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge (ISSEK) have found that over a five-year period spent measuring the scientific literacy of the Russian public, the percentage of people who find it difficult to answer ‘elementary school’ questions – for example, questions about the Earth’s core or continental drift – is steadily declining. But questions any more specific than that continue to leave people scratching their heads.
Many young employees of museums, art centres and galleries, libraries and publishing houses move up the career ladder fairly fast, yet workplace success comes at a cost, forcing them to work beyond normal hours and outside formal job descriptions. Nevertheless, employees of cultural institutions are prepared to make the extra effort to help their organisations survive, according to Margarita Kuleva, lecturer at the Department of Sociology, HSE campus in St. Petersburg.
By choosing education for their children, parents tend to perpetuate social inequalities. While educated middle-class parents invest in their children's future by selecting the best possible school and becoming actively involved in the educational process, working-class families often feel they cannot afford to choose and instead, send children to the nearest school, expecting them to make it on their own, according to Larisa Shpakovskaya, Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, HSE Campus in St. Petersburg.
Overall, Russians tend to be satisfied with their country's health care system, particularly when they do not need to deal with it; however, those with recent first-hand experience of healthcare often complain about the lack of professionalism and the decline in free medical services, according to Sergey Shishkin, Head of HSE's Department of Health Care Administration and Economy, and Natalia Kochkinaand Marina Krasilnikova, sociologists with the Levada Centre, in their paper Health Care Service Availability and Quality as Assessed by the Russian Public.
In 2015, the world celebrates the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, an event that is a particularly important part of Russian and German history. Scholars from the two countries were the authors of the latest edition of the Journal of Social Policy Studies.
Decisions relating to student dropout often resemble a trial with students as defendants and teachers as prosecutors and judges. This approach can create barriers between students and staff and raise the issue of the university's mission, according to Ivan Gruzdev, Evgeny Terentiev and Elena Gorbunova of the HSE’s Internal Monitoring Center.
Seongsoo Choi, PhD in sociology and Junior Fellow at the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course (CIQLE), Yale University, will begin teaching in his new role as Assistant Professor of Sociology at the HSE St. Petersburg campus in September. He spoke to the HSE English News service about his research in social inequality, about the work he will be doing at HSE St Petersburg and about being a part of the international academic community.
