St Petersburg University hosts a discussion on the legal aspects of the admission procedure

Opening the meeting, Nikolay Kropachev, Rector of St Petersburg University, noted that the procedure guaranteeing citizens' access to higher education affects hundreds of thousands of former schoolchildren, as well as their parents, and therefore needs to be improved. It is no coincidence that this year the state devoted special attention to this issue and created an integrated system 'Admission to Universities Online' to solve the problem. 'Admission 2021 had certain distinctive features, which were related not only to technical issues, but also to regulatory ones. In particular, it was the first time that we were admitting students in one wave,' said Nikolay Kropachev, Rector of St Petersburg University. 'Does this solution protect the rights of applicants? Does it enable them to make an informed decision when choosing the university? Does the possibility of an informed decision constitute a psychological moment or a legal requirement?'

Various points of view on this issue have been presented in the media and in academic publications. St Petersburg University presented its vision of the situation in the article ‘The Right of Access to Higher Education: Administrative and Legal Aspect’, co-authored by: Nikolay Kropachev, Rector of St Petersburg University; Yulia Linskaya, Deputy Head of the Russian Presidential Directorate for Science and Education Policy; and Aleksandr Babich, Vice-Rector for Student Affairs and Admissions of St Petersburg University. The article will appear in the next issue of the Vestnik of St Petersburg University (Law).

Aleksandr Babich, Vice-Rector for Student Affairs and Admissions of St Petersburg University, presented the main points of the article to the participants of the meeting. He said that, according to international and constitutional law, higher education should be equally accessible to all and based on one's abilities. The only criterion for access is the abilities of an individual that shall be determined through a competitive admission process. In this context, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation stresses that, in establishing the conditions for the realisation of a right, the parties to legal relations shall be able to reasonably foresee the consequences of their behaviour.

This is an important point, since both applicants and their parents should be able to foresee the legal consequences that will arise from any meaningful legal action when making a decision as part of the admission procedure.

Aleksandr Babich, Vice-Rector for Student Affairs and Admissions of St Petersburg University

The effective statutory regulation on admission procedures, introduced in the Regulations for Admission to Main Educational Programmes of Higher Education, as approved by Decree of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation No 1076, stipulates two phases of enrolment in the regulation for admission in 2021. The first one is priority admission for those applicants who are enrolled without entrance examinations as part of special and target quotas. The second phase is admission for all applicants applying as part of the general competition. In effect, there is actually a single phase of admission. It should also be taken into account that the admission procedure sets a limit on the number of higher education institutions an applicant can apply to. Currently, an applicant may apply to no more than five higher education institutions. Consent to enrolment is essentially an expression of the applicant's will, whereby they declare that they agree to be enrolled in a specific academic programme, on a particular type of study and in a particular educational institution.

In his report, Aleksandr Babich, Vice-Rector for Student Affairs and Admissions of St Petersburg University, illustrated the practical application of the admission regulations in 2021 at the University. In particular, he drew attention to the fact that during the submission of consent for admission, applicants and their parents were submitting their consents in an irregular manner. Within the consent submission period, during the first four days, the University received 36% of the total number of consents, while in the last two days almost 64% of the documents were submitted. Moreover, 12% of the total number of consents for admission were submitted in the last two hours of the allowed time.

The admission procedure in 2021 provided the option of submitting applications electronically via: the Public Services Portal ‘Gosuslugi’; the electronic system of higher education institutions; email; postal services; and personal appointment, whichever stipulated in the admission procedure of a particular higher education institution.

Aleksandr Babich, Vice-Rector for Student Affairs and Admissions of St Petersburg University

'According to the general rule, all these documents shall be submitted to the university before 6pm. Admissions committees should have time to process them to reflect the real situation in the competition lists on the website,' said Aleksandr Babich. 'Naturally, it is almost impossible to assess the real competitive situation on the admission lists in this way. This means that applicants and their parents submit their consent to enrolment virtually at random, to the best of their knowledge, in a situation of complete uncertainty.’ This has led to a situation in which applicants who applied for admission before the deadline and saw that they were eligible for admission, after 6pm, were left out of the allocated quota for government-funded places. This was due to the fact that the admission committees had processed all applications for admission and the last-minute applications from applicants had been ranked higher in the ranking lists.

'Thus, in practice, it turns out that applicants and their parents do not have a reasonable opportunity to foresee the consequences of their legally significant actions under these regulations,' said Aleksandr Babich. 'This ultimately leads to social tension and complaints from parents to universities and controlling and supervising bodies regarding non-enrolment.'

The most rational approach to the organisation of admission to bachelor's and specialist's programmes within the admission quotas, according to the authors of the article ‘The Right of Access to Higher Education: Administrative and Legal Aspect’, is to enrol applicants in accordance with the priority of higher education institutions and the academic programmes they specify in the application for admission. At the same time, the integrated system ‘Admission to Universities Online’ provides a technological solution removing the limitation on the maximum number of educational institutions to which an application for admission can be submitted. 'With the number of government-funded places available in the higher education system, a former school student should be able to choose any university and take part in the competition according to the priority of these universities and programmes. Only if they have fully exhausted their priorities and have not been admitted anywhere, they understand that it was their abilities – the results of the exams they submitted that prevented them from being enrolled,' said Aleksandr Babich, Vice-Rector for Student Affairs and Admissions of St Petersburg University, concluding his speech.