Minister of Science and Higher Education Valery Falkov proposed to introduce industrial postgraduate studies in Russia in order to provide the economy with appropriately trained personnel. He made this proposal at a meeting of the council for strategic development and national projects.

According to him, now there are not enough graduate students defending their dissertations to meet the needs of the economy.

„It should be noted that the effectiveness of postgraduate studies leaves much to be desired. In 2021, the graduation of graduate students amounted to 14.3 thousand, of which only 10.5% defended dissertations during the preparation period. This is still better than in 2019, there were 8, 9%, but clearly not enough to provide the economy with scientific personnel,” Falkov said.

At the same time, according to him, for the third year there has been an „improvement in the quality of a number of indicators of the activities of the institute of graduate school,” including an increase in the number of graduate students and candidate and doctoral theses that have been defended. In addition, in 2022, the number of state-funded places in graduate school for young scientists was increased from 16.5 thousand to 17.5 thousand places, and, „first of all, there is an increase in admission to engineering, technical specialties, as well as mathematical and natural areas.”

„The development and development of the format of industrial postgraduate studies, which involves the implementation of a dissertation project in the interests of and together with the company, this will provide an opportunity to train highly qualified personnel to solve applied problems, which is especially important in the current conditions,” the minister believes.