New rules for admission to universities for paid tuition: what will change from September 1st

Starting from September 1, 2025, new rules for admission to universities for paid tuition will apply in Russia. The law, signed by President Vladimir Putin in May 2025, introduces state regulation of commercial student recruitment. See the Izvestia article about what will change this academic year.

New rules for admission to universities for paid tuition

Starting in September 2025, the government of the Russian Federation will have the authority to regulate the number of paid places in universities, areas of study and specialties, as well as establish rules for determining tuition fees. According to Ekaterina Kharchenko, deputy head of the State Duma Committee on Science and Higher Education, changes are being made to the law on Education.

Today, about half of the students study for a fee, the Ministry of Education and Science reported. At the same time, 42.5% of paid students study economics and law.

Starting from September 1, the rules for admission to universities on a fee basis will change in Russia.

The purpose of the measure is to ensure the quality of specialist training and to balance the labor market.

"It's not about restrictions, it's about the quality of education. We are working together with the Ministry of Science and Higher Education on the regulatory framework for the implementation of this law, and together with the expert community, rectors, and higher school teachers, we are defining the criteria by which this threshold value of the paid admission figure will be determined," Ekaterina Kharchenko told RIA Novosti.

The main changes include:

• Control of the number of paid seats. Universities will no longer be able to arbitrarily increase the number of commercial students. The planned indicators will be coordinated with the founders — 18 federal executive authorities. They will monitor the execution of the plan.

• Regulation of tuition fees. The government will have the right to set price limits for paid education.

• Competition for paid seats. The law deals with the introduction of a competition for commercial places, Kharchenko said.

• Coordination of specialties. According to the MP, it is impossible to train specialists who will not be in demand in a situation of an imbalance between the labor market and the education system.

Earlier, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin stated that specialists should be trained in the areas of healthcare, education and engineering. The head of the Ministry of Education and Science, Valery Falkov, clarified that the biggest problem is focused on the areas of "Economics and Management" and "Jurisprudence". Despite the large number of graduates, there is a shortage of qualified economists and lawyers in the market.

Ekaterina Kharchenko also noted that by the end of 2025, a document will appear that prescribes clear criteria for which universities and how many paid admission places they will be able to apply for.

"We have made changes to the law on Education regarding a new mechanism for regulating paid admission starting in 2026," Kharchenko said.

What were the rules before

The state has previously regulated the rules for admission to universities for paid tuition. But the law, according to the parliamentarian, "did not have a clear position," so this control was more flexible and soft. Thus, all universities submitted planned figures for both budget and commercial admission, but the plans were not monitored. This led to a number of problems:

• Uncontrolled recruitment. Universities could accept as many students for paid tuition as their resources allowed, which sometimes reduced the quality of education due to overcrowded groups.

• High cost. Universities have a wide range of prices, in some of them the cost of tuition reaches hundreds of thousands of rubles per year. This makes education inaccessible to many.

• The lack of a unified approach. Each university set its own admission rules, which created confusion for applicants. The deadline for submitting documents and enrolling in paid tuition could last until the end of September, which complicated planning.

In addition, in many universities, it is enough to overcome the minimum threshold of USE scores in order to enroll in a paid department, and in some cases universities accepted applicants even with low results.