On June 20, Russia's universities opened admissions for the new academic year. The government has eliminated 47,000 tuition-paying places and scrapped subsidized student loans for most fields of study. The first targets are programs in economics, management, and law at universities that do not specialize in those fields, but the cuts extend beyond those areas.

Combined with the abolition of the Bologna system and the government's ongoing effort to steer high school students out of secondary schools and into vocational colleges, these measures point to a sweeping overhaul of Russia's entire education system. In the coming years, the reform may help address labor shortages, but over the longer term it is likely to leave millions of Russians either with an education that does not match the needs of the job market or with no higher education at all.

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