Currently, Russia gets 70% of specialists with higher education, 20% with vocational and 10% with primary education, noted ONEXIM group President Mikhail Prokhorov speaking at the session. Meanwhile, market demands are completely different: companies and industries need 80% of specialists with vocational training and only 20% of university graduates can actually find jobs after they get diplomas.

So, half of young people with their prestigious diplomas simply have to earn money doing something different from what they actually studied for four to five years. And that is a waste of resources: both human and financial.

The State Council agreed that it is crucial to break the stereotype that getting non-academic education is not prestigious and, as well as the state, mass media should contribute to that. Among the ideas suggested was launching social advertising campaigns and even using Soviet experience, when feature films were used as a propaganda tool to popularize one or another profession.

But that is just one side of the coin. State authorities and business representatives should have a clear idea of how many and what kinds of specialists will be of demand for the needs of economic development of the state.

The vocational education system in Russia should be clearly oriented at the order from the state and business, Medvedev said, cites Itar-Tass. “The specialists should be educated with due account the real needs of economy in terms of modernization,” he added. Therefore, qualitative forecasting is necessary.

“Regional industrial forecasts of the demand in personnel should be made to reorient the professional technical education for the needs of promising productions,” the president stressed. “A clear-cut order is needed here: how many specialists, with what level, what qualifications are needed on the national scale,” Medvedev underlined.

Foreign teachers should not be exotic – Medvedev

Bringing the level of the vocational education to a higher standard is yet another significant task that the State Council discussed. Addressing this task requires financing to provide colleges with up-to-date equipment, not to mention qualified teaching staff including professionals from abroad.

President Medvedev stressed that foreign teachers should not be “exotic” in modem Russia. He recalled that in pre-revolutionary Russia – before 1917 – foreign teachers were quite a common thing. “It was not because our teachers were bad, but because an educational exchange was needed,” he underlined.

At the same time, the president said, Russian educators should have more opportunities for exchanging experience with their foreign colleagues: through retraining educational programs, trainee courses, and working under long-term contracts in the best foreign universities.

The president also believes that continuous education is one of the principals Russia should stick to, since currently it “is lagging far behind the member-countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,” where adults do get that kind of education.

The situation with facilities that colleges are now provided with is rather discouraging, as some speakers noted at Tuesday’s meeting. And young professionals are being trained on old equipment that is no longer used anywhere else.

Moscow’s Mayor Yury Luzhkov raised the sensitive issue of education for disabled young people. He said that, in addition to methodological complications in teaching such youngsters, there are difficulties with defining fields where they could work after they graduate. Meanwhile, in the capital alone, he said, there are 26,000 children with disabilities.

Official caught tweeting during session

A meeting of Russia’s State Council –which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year – is always quite an event. This year it was held at the St. George Hall – the largest in the Kremlin – to accommodate all 105 participants of the gathering.

Despite all the pomp of the meeting, it was marked with some humorous occasions. As the state’s senior officials were deciding the future of education in Russia, some participants – like naughty school kids – were playing with their cool electronic gadgets and “tweeting”.

President Medvedev had no choice but to play the role of a strict teacher and call on those surfing the web mid-session to behave.

“[Kirovsky region governor] Nikita … Belykh is posting something on his Twitter page right now, during the State Council session, as if he has nothing else to do,” the president noted.

The politician responded to the president via twitter, saying “I agree completely. But, first, I was attentively listening. Second [Tomsk region Governor] Kress’s report was sent a week before and read.”

Before being caught red-handed, Belykh had managed to send about ten “tweets”. Notably, his first message posted during the meeting reads: “About 10-15 people at the State Council are with iPads. Before the same guys had laptops. Stenographers, damn.”

Presidential aide Arkady Dvorkovich was also spotted tweeting, but, as Itar-Tass notes, was lagging behind Belykh with only five new messages on his page.

What remains a mystery, though, is how the president found out what his colleagues’ were doing on the Internet during the meeting.

Dmitry Medvedev is an avid Internet user and also has his own Twitter account. He has been urging officials to more actively use modern technologies and go digital, but judging by the meeting it appears some of them have taken it too literally.

Natalia Makarova, RT