News

Children from families with high professional and educational status are twice as likely to enter a prestigious university as their peers from low-resource families, HSE University researchers have found. The ‘privileged’ adolescents benefit from strong family attitudes towards a good education, parental investment in their studies and the high academic performance associated with it. At the same time, even when they have good grades, students from poorly educated families do not even try to get into prestigious universities.

The Faculty of Humanities is now accepting applications to its new Master’s programme, ‘Germanica: History and Modernity’ for the fall of 2020. The programme gives students a wide-ranging knowledge of the German-speaking regions of the world—Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The programme is taught in Russian and German. Applicants’ proficiency of German will be verified upon admission. Professor Petr Rezvykh, the programme’s Academic Supervisor, discusses the features of the programme.

How can you live in Europe a whole year without spending a single euro? Is it safe to travel alone? Do you need to learn the local language of your destination if you know English?  At HSE’s Cultural Centre on January 25, guests could get answers to all their burning questions about independent and off-the-beaten-path travel at the Wild Travel Festival. 

On January 24, the HSE Academic Council approved the new University Development Programme for 2030, which the Council had been drafting for the past year. Members of the Academic Council also discussed the status of the university’s digital transformation.

Stories of Salvation, or How We Grew Up, a book co-authored by HSE Lyceum senior Elena Tsybulina, tells the stories of ghetto and concentration camp survivors during WWII. The book was released shortly before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is observed on January 27.

Is a political scientist a true scientist and should political scientists be categorised as either theoreticians or practitioners? Why is Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’ a ‘must read’ and is there any point in communicating with someone who has stopped learning? Can a modern university fence itself off from the world around it, and what does critical thinking have to do with it? These are some of the subjects we touch on in our conversation with Alexei Chesnakov, School of Politics and Governance professor with the Faculty of Social Sciences.

Maxim Oreshkin, Russia’s former Minister of Economic Development, was appointed Advisor to the President of the Russian Federation, following Vladimir Putin's decree of January 24.

On January 22, Thomas Graham, former Special Assistant to the President of the United States on Russian and Eurasian affairs (2004-2007), spoke to faculty and students of the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs about the fundamentally competitive nature of US-Russia relations and prospects for cooperation between the two countries.