Figure of the day: 8 million people with higher education turned out to be unnecessary for our economy

An interesting version of events related to the fall of the USSR was put forward in his channel by journalist Pavel Pryanikov:

“It was thought that the late Soviet revolt of the intelligentsia also had an economic basis - the underestimation of the work of a person with a higher education. A salesman or a butcher in a store, a skilled worker (here not only an official salary) had more than an engineer, a junior researcher and a teacher. Although the general rule of thumb is that each additional year of study brings an n-increase to the national average earnings. In modern Russia now this n is 5-8% for an additional year of study, in developed economies - 8-12% or more. Higher education is a kind of your investment in yourself, which should bring a certain rent as a result.

The violation of this economic law bore fruit in the 1980s".

Pryanikov cites as one of the arguments of this point of view the words of the apologist of Sovietism, the left Orthodox Sergei Kara-Murza, who recalled with bewilderment:

“At one time my neighbor in a communal flat was a long-distance driver. Strong and dense, just a beast. He came to me and began to torture me: why, after graduating from Moscow State University, working from morning to night in the laboratory, I received 105 rubles. a month, and he, a stupid ignoramus and a drunkard, almost 400 rubles. “Something is wrong here. There will be trouble", - he said".

As it turns out, the fate of people with higher education in modern Russia is also far from ideal and largely repeats the Soviet one. Economists Balatsky and Yekimova from the Financial University write in their work, which is quoted by the blog "Tolkovatel":

“According to the author's calculations according to Rosstat data, the number of university graduates for the period 1992-2020. amounted to 27.8 million people. All these 27.8 million people. “New” ICS (specialists of the highest category) have entered the labor market over the past 30 years and remain there due to their still insignificant age - less than 52 years. If we add to them the “old” ICS who continue to work, then the total number of workers with higher education should amount to about 32 million people (and not 24.3 million people, according to Rosstat data).

Thus, we come to the paradoxical conclusion that over the past years the country has "produced" about 8 million people. with higher education, who "evaporated" without a trace.

The identified personnel imbalance is not an accidental, but a systemic phenomenon. To prove this thesis, we will carry out similar computational operations for the agriculture, forestry and fishing industries. The number of its employees by 2020 was 4.2 million people. Of these, only 540 thousand people. have higher education, of which, in turn, 150 thousand people are "old" (Soviet) cadres. Consequently, the “new” ICS amounted to only 390 thousand people, whereas, according to our calculations, according to Rosstat data, for the period 1992-2020. the country's universities have trained 905 thousand people for this industry. Thus, more than half a million graduates of the agrarian sector, forestry and fisheries "disappeared without a trace".

The identified personnel imbalances are too significant to be ignored. Without going into groundless hypotheses, we will only point out the possible fate of the 8 million army of certified cadres of various specialties. Apparently, these university graduates have created a kind of "staff overhang", which for various reasons turned out to be unused, in connection with which it was distributed through several channels: migration from the country; migration to the informal sector; care for the household sector; marginalization of university graduates - from dequalification and work in spheres that do not require higher education (with a corresponding dropout from statistics) to complete social deprivation (chronic unemployed, small rentiers, homeless people, etc.).

The main conclusion from the entire previous analysis is that the educational bubble that took place in the country led to the separation of the higher education system from the real sector of the economy in the form of supplying an excess and unclaimed number of graduates to the labor market. The logical result of this process was the paradoxical "evaporation" of 8-10 million specialists of the highest category. The reasons for the lack of demand for persons with higher education are obvious: the lack of jobs in the Russian economy for graduates of universities of the corresponding profile and their professional unsuitability and, consequently, inability to work in their specialty at the level required by the market”...