Translartion. Region: Russians Fedetion –
Source: State University Higher School of Economics – State University Higher School of Economics –
Employees Labor Market Research Laboratories (LIRT) HSE University found that 70% of correspondence course graduates do not receive a significant salary increase within a year after graduating. This is different from full-time course graduates, who earn more in their first year, and the gap grows in the future. The results of the study are presented in the article “The fate of a correspondence student: graduates of Russian correspondence universities in the labor market“, published in the journal “Education Issues” No. 1 for 2025.
The authors of the study — LIRT research fellow, PhD in Economics Ksenia Rozhkova, LIRT head Sergey Roshchin and LIRT senior research fellow Pavel Travkin — state that one of the important mechanisms for the massification of Russian higher education at the turn of the 2000s was the growth in the coverage of the population by correspondence programs. Correspondence students still make up a significant part of the university graduates: 41.6% among the graduates of 2018 and 35.7% among the graduates of 2022.
The analysis is based on the total administrative data of the Graduate Employment Monitoring Project, a project implemented jointly by the Russian Ministry of Labor and Social Protection and the Federal Service for Labor and Employment. The data cover bachelor’s and specialist’s degree graduates of two graduation years – 2018 and 2022. Their results in the labor market are measured from October 2022 to September 2023, i.e. during the first year after receiving their diploma for the 2022 class and the fifth year for the 2018 class.
The authors of the study focus on full-time and part-time bachelor’s and specialist’s degree graduates of 2018 and 2022: 649,269 observations in 2018 and 568,375 observations in 2022. Part-time graduates make up 41.6 and 35.7% of the sample, respectively. The sample is limited to graduates who did not continue their education in other higher education programs – master’s, postgraduate, etc.
According to the available data, in their final year, part-time students earn more than full-time graduates, which may be the result of the difference in hours spent on work (full-time for part-time students and part-time for full-time students). However, despite the higher start, further growth in part-time students’ salaries is extremely slow, which allows full-time graduates to quickly make up for the initial lag. A year after graduation, full-time students earn on average 3-5% more than part-time graduates, and five years after graduation, the situation changes dramatically: the salary gap increases to 22% in favor of full-time graduates.
Researchers explain this by the fact that the value of skills and work experience of full-time students increases faster, probably due to differences in the quality of acquired human capital. A difference in the return on the same characteristics for graduates of full-time and part-time education has been recorded. For example, the experience of combining study with work turns out to be more valuable for graduates of full-time programs. The presence of longer work experience among part-time students, including during their studies, reduces the observed salary gap, while traditional indicators of education quality (type of university, diploma with honors) increase it.
On the one hand, distance learning allows you to work full-time, support yourself, build a career, and achieve leadership positions while receiving your diploma. However, the weak positive dynamics of labor income after graduation and the rapidly growing gap in salaries with full-time graduates show that a diploma from a distance learning program is obviously not equal to a diploma from full-time education. The reason is primarily that distance learning programs are attended by academically less capable students, including those who would otherwise not be able to graduate from a university. The competition for distance learning programs is virtually non-existent or extremely low; they are attended mainly by graduates of secondary vocational education who use college as a way to bypass the Unified State Exam.
The authors of the study also note that full-time education involves the development of a fundamentally different level of professional skills, which is unavailable when mastering a program part-time. As a result, the lack of a professional foundation, which is laid by high-quality educational training, does not allow part-time graduates to grow professionally after university, as evidenced by their low career and salary mobility. In the perspective of five years, even low-selective full-time education turns out to be more economically advantageous than part-time education.
Another factor is the surrounding social environment, which makes it possible to build stable horizontal connections: this is only available in face-to-face education.
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