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Agricultural education: between theory and practice. Agriculture

At the beginning of June, Milknews was contacted by employees of the St. Petersburg State Agrarian University with a request to write an article about the state of agricultural education in Russia and to draw the attention of the authorities to what is happening in the country's leading agricultural universities. According to readers, the teams of these educational organizations are now in a very difficult situation.

We decided to delve into the problem of personnel shortage, the level of Russian education and the conflicts that have accompanied agricultural universities in recent years, and prepared a series of texts about how the reform of agricultural education is taking place. In the first text, Milknews will talk about how the system itself works, in the second - about what is happening at St. Petersburg State Agrarian University and Russian State Agrarian University-Moscow Agricultural Academy named after K.A. Timiryazev and other large universities, and in the third - how the education system works abroad.

How is higher agricultural education organized in Russia today?

Today, the system of higher agricultural education of the Ministry of Agriculture is concentrated in two groups - “Agriculture, forestry and fisheries” and “Veterinary and zootechnology”.

There are no problems with recruiting students - every year 150 thousand specialists graduate from higher and secondary educational institutions. Although, despite the fact that the academy copes with accepting students, most applicants prefer to enroll in more prestigious but related fields - biotechnology, landscape architecture, senior researcher, director of the breeding station of the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy, Grigory Monakhos, told Milknews. Therefore, according to him, among the main problems of agricultural education is chronic underfunding.

We made developments for Vladimir Putin’s program at the Center for Strategic Developments, among them there were proposals related to the practice-oriented part of training, as well as a shift in emphasis from higher education to secondary specialized education and the modernization of all rural vocational schools, which at the moment, unfortunately , are completely collapsed, as well as to remote colleges and institutes in the regions,” Natalya Shagaida, director of the Center for Agricultural Policy at RANEPA, tells Milknews.

What does the labor market look like?

As a result, the share of young people under 30 years of age in the agricultural sector is 12.5%. According to Rosstat, in 2000, the replacement of elderly people by rural youth was 238%; by 2010, the figure dropped to 86%, and by 2020 it will drop to 15%.

The number of certified specialists on farms is steadily declining. Thus, the share of the number of certified specialists in the main services of agricultural organizations today is less than 60% of the 2000 level.

Until the beginning of the 2010s, there was a trend towards expanding the workforce of mass agricultural professions, but by 2014 - just in time for the beginning of import substitution - it began to decline. In just two years, the need for personnel decreased by 15%, reaching 1.1 million people. This is due, first of all, to a sharp leap in the modernization of agricultural farms, as a result of which the need for extra personnel in low-productivity work has disappeared.

The majority of workers in mass professions have no professional education at all - most often this is due to the low level of secondary education in rural schools, as well as weak competitive advantages when entering educational institutions located far from home. Most of these workers acquire the necessary skills at a young age, working with their parents.

Of the 25 thousand heads of agricultural organizations, only 67% have higher education, 25% have secondary vocational education. Another 8% (that’s almost 2 thousand people) are practitioners. Moreover, of all managers, only 20% have economic or management education, another 23% have non-core education, and only 1.8% of managers have an academic degree.

For example, according to studies of the personnel structure in the Oryol region, of managers - managers and specialists - only 50.2% have higher education, 44.3% have secondary vocational education. The fewest people with higher education are among chief power engineers and electricians, chief engineers and chief accountants.

According to Alexey Kozlov, chief researcher at the All-Russian Research Institute of Agricultural Economics, the labor market in the agricultural sector is also unbalanced along gender lines. The so-called “shortage of brides” in the agricultural sector in some regions is becoming an acute problem even for large high-tech agricultural organizations. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, agricultural labor in the country as a whole in all sectors is carried out to a greater extent by men, and women make up approximately a third of industry workers. At the same time, in livestock farming, for example, the female team predominates.

What does business not like about the education system?

According to the All-Russian Research Institute of Agricultural Economics, every year the number of managers and specialists of agricultural enterprises with higher education is decreasing, and today the shortage of qualified personnel exceeds 80 thousand people.

It turns out that with the annual graduation rate of university students exceeding the deficit by 70 thousand people, the business need for specialists is only increasing. One of the reasons is the discrepancy between education and the needs of the rural labor market.

“Agricultural education still has little to do with what needs to be applied in practice. This applies to a greater extent to applied specialties,” says Shagaida.

One of the members of the state examination commission of the Russian State Agrarian University-Moscow Agricultural Academy named after K.A. agrees with her. Timiryazev. As he explained to Milknews, the gap between the education received and the necessary experience is only growing. “One of the key problems is the isolation of the learning process from the real sector, from business; graduates come not ready (and worst of all, unwilling) to work. That is, even in theory they are underspecialized (the result, among other things, of the bachelor’s degree program), and in practice, even more so.”

Vice-Rector of the Novosibirsk State Agrarian University Vladislav Babin claims that, first of all, there is a shortage of technological personnel, and a state university cannot immediately train students for private companies:

Managers retire, and new personnel are not suitable - this is the result of problems with contractual and targeted training. The law provides for training for enterprises with state participation, and the bulk of agricultural producers are private companies, so the university simply does not have the right to conduct targeted training for them.

President of the Dmitrov Vegetables agricultural holding Sergei Filippov emphasizes that the industry lacks agronomists, veterinarians, livestock specialists, and technologists. Babin also named the same specialties among the most scarce.

What do young people not like?

Vitaly Sheremet, practice manager for working with companies in the agro-industrial sector at KPMG in Russia and the CIS, believes that agricultural education remains unattractive for applicants.

“The main problems are that, according to some estimates even from the Ministry of Agriculture itself, more than 90% of graduates do not work in their specialty. The sector itself is unattractive for graduates and applicants. They enroll in it on a residual basis - not everyone, but often those who don’t get into agricultural universities get into them, they enroll just to show off their education, and when they graduate, they go into commerce or any other sector.”

A sociological study among students of Oryol State Agrarian University showed that 3.7% of respondents do not want to work, live and work in rural areas under any circumstances. Another 44% of graduates are ready to live and work in the village if they receive decent wages and if the infrastructure in the area is established (30%). A quarter of respondents from the Faculty of Biotechnology and Veterinary Medicine considered the provision of housing with good living conditions to be necessary conditions.

According to Sheremet, the state’s goal in attracting young people is obvious - to prove that it is possible to earn money and build a career in the countryside. “We need to solve infrastructure issues, issues of supporting SMEs, develop technologies to reduce the distance from the village from producer to consumer, build roads and the Internet - there is no quick solution here, this is a systemic, painstaking policy of the state.”

Vice-Rector of the Novosibirsk State Agrarian University Vladislav Babin talks about another problem - those who study on a budget, having tasted the fruits of the city, do not want to return to the infrastructure where they grew up, they have nowhere to spend their leisure time.

How to attract specialists?

“Agricultural business must understand that without providing a graduate with certain conditions - accommodation, a social package, a decent salary - there is no chance of getting good specialists, especially young ones,” says Sergei Filippov, president of the Dmitrovskie Vegetables agricultural holding.

Agricultural holdings understand this very well; most of them have developed a package that provides for increased wages for the period of “acclimatization” and outlined growth prospects. Large companies today offer graduate programs; they attract students during their studies and actively select future specialists. Filippov confirms that every year there are more and more graduates who end up directly in commercial structures.

According to Vitaly Sheremet, large holdings can solve the problem with personnel themselves, but in rural areas it should be solved by the state.

A village today can compete not only with a city, as it was before, it can even compete with other countries and industries - you can sit in a village and code something for Silicon Valley. The solution is that the village should offer something more interesting to young people. An important factor that is necessary to attract young people to the village is prospects, profitability, the opportunity to start your own business and run your own farm. Work in villages is in small forms, today large holdings are industrializing so much that they no longer need a large number of people, says Sheremet.

“In the village, everything is different,” confirms Filippov. “Some people work with their parents from childhood, somewhere there remains a layer of people who do not go to large farms and stay with themselves, but this is more applicable to small farms.” .

However, Filippov believes that agricultural education is entering a positive vector of development for the first time in 5-7 years.

“Leading agricultural holdings are creating their own departments and training formats, supported by practitioners, although so far this is more an exception than a practice,” he says. “Then it becomes more interesting to study in a specific way, and the best students can count on jobs in advance.” Here is the immediate answer to how the education system can be changed - it should be built on the needs of business.”

He is confident that the period when everyone received an education for money, and no one was interested in its quality, is coming to an end, and those young people who want to get an education understand that no one in this industry needs to study for a diploma. Peripheral universities are sometimes significantly ahead of capital ones - it is easier to work with them. “Applicants in the regions go to study with the understanding that they will connect their future lives with agriculture, which cannot be said about the capital’s universities,” says Filippov.

In the meantime, Russia is the only country among the top 10 producers of agricultural products in the world whose agricultural universities are not included in the main world rankings of higher education institutions, for example, QS University Rankings. At the same time, the state sets the sector the task of increasing exports to $45 billion.

The Agricultural Technological Institute (ATI) was created in 2015 by transforming the Agrarian Faculty of RUDN University, which was founded as the Faculty of Agriculture in 1961.

ATI RUDN University is the “Institute of Life”, since graduates are engaged in the production, processing and certification of crop and livestock products, and this is the basis of life. The institute provides training in 25 educational programs, including 5 in English. Here they train specialists for the agro-industrial complex; agricultural holdings; processing and expert production related to food quality; various management, expert, production structures; international agribusiness.

ATI RUDN has opened 5 joint master's programs with leading universities in the world:

“Management and design of urban green infrastructure” - with the University of Tuscia (Italy)
“Remote sensing of natural resources” - with the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece)
“Organic farming” - with the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece)
“Technologies for ensuring the quality and safety of food products and production” - with the Kyrgyz State Technical University named after. I. Razzakova (Kyrgyzstan)
“Modern biotechnologies in animal husbandry” - with the Kyrgyz Agrarian University named after. K.I.Skryabina (Kyrgyzstan)

An important part of training at ATI is industrial training (practice), which takes place in agricultural holdings, veterinary clinics, stations for combating diseases of farm animals, land management, appraisal, real estate organizations and in business structures. ATI's laboratories and research centers are equipped with innovative equipment and are used in research work.

Students, while studying in the main areas and specialties, can study foreign languages (English, Chinese, German, French, etc.).

The partners of the Agricultural Technology Institute in the field of education and science are leading universities around the world: USA, Greece, Kyrgyzstan, Italy.

The institute has 2 dissertation councils for defending candidate and doctoral dissertations in 4 specialties.

Teachers

The institute employs 110 teachers, including:

1 Nobel laureate
25 professors and doctors of science
55 associate professors and candidates of sciences
10 foreign scientific and pedagogical workers
10 full members and corresponding members of various public academies of sciences.

Leading experts, scientists and practitioners regularly conduct lectures, master classes, seminars, summer schools, and conferences in Russian and English at ATI.

The agricultural industry is developing by leaps and bounds. It is thanks to its specialists that our everyday life has an up-to-date appearance. Every year the need for qualified representatives of this field is growing, as the rural industry, to which it is directly related, is becoming increasingly widespread.

Today, two types of educational institutions that produce agricultural specialists are relevant. These include:

higher educational institutions (agricultural institute, agricultural university);
secondary specialized educational institutions (agricultural colleges, agricultural technical schools).

It is noteworthy that within the framework of secondary specialized education, there is an option of admission after nine years of schooling. Most graduates continue their studies at higher educational institutions, which allows them to produce high-class specialists.

Agricultural college/technical school - specialties

They focus on specialties, the application of which is possible on the basis of basic knowledge. These include:

veterinary medicine;
agricultural mechanization;
geodetic business;
forestry and fisheries;
repair and maintenance of vehicles.

This list may be variable, depending on the list of specializations.

Specialties in agricultural colleges:

Krasnoyarsk Agrarian College (Agricultural mechanization, electrification and automation of agriculture, game management and fur farming);
Omsk Agrarian College (Technology of production and processing of agricultural products, land and property relations);
Irkutsk Agrarian College (Agricultural mechanization, agronomy, cynology, game management and fur farming, veterinary medicine);
Novosibirsk Agrarian College (FSPO "Lugovskoy" College) (Veterinary medicine, agricultural mechanization, electrification and automation of agriculture, canine training).

Agricultural University - specialties

If we talk about the faculties and specialties of the agricultural university, which is much more extensive, it is also necessary to indicate a list of faculties. The large list of specialties is due to the fact that in addition to continuing education in specialties related to secondary specialized education, it is necessary to provide personnel in other specialties, the training of which is carried out only after 11 grades.

Of course, the list of faculties may differ slightly, depending on the choice of a particular institution, but the main ones are considered to be:

Agrotechnical;
Faculty of Agrochemistry, Soil Science, Ecology and Water Use;
Veterinary Faculty;
Faculty of Natural Sciences;
Faculty of Land Management;
Faculty of Animal Science;
Faculty of Business Economics.

There are a great variety of agricultural specialties today, however, speaking about which specialties at an agricultural university today are most in demand, the following should be noted:

geodesy;
agricultural mechanization.

A special place in the list of specializations is occupied by: agricultural economics and agricultural machinery and technology.

Specialties in agricultural universities:

Altai State Agrarian University, Barnaul (agroengineering, agronomy, agrochemistry and agrosoil science, veterinary medicine, veterinary and sanitary examination, animal science, horticulture, food of animal origin, technology of production and processing of agricultural products);
Bashkir State Agrarian University, Ufa (agroengineering, agronomy, agrochemistry and agro-soil science);
Krasnoyarsk State Agrarian University (veterinary pharmacy, agroecology, technology of meat and meat products, technology of production and processing of agricultural products, veterinary and sanitary examination, agricultural engineering, agronomy);
Saratov State Agrarian University named after N.I. Vavilova (Natural fires and their control, veterinary medicine, agronomy, food products of animal origin, food products from plant materials, agricultural engineering, agronomy, veterinary medicine);
Stavropol State Agrarian University (agroengineering, agronomy, technology of production and processing of agricultural products, animal science, veterinary and sanitary examination, land management and cadastres, technology of production and processing of agricultural products, food products from plant materials).

Specialty: Agricultural Economics, as a factor of stable growth

Agricultural economics has gained popularity due to the emergence of enterprises that need economists who can understand all the intricacies of agricultural enterprises. A wide range of profiles of agricultural enterprises implies the use of special techniques. They allow, in addition to drawing up current economic situations, to make forecasts that take into account all sorts of factors from a specialized field.

Agricultural machinery and technology – the specialty of the future

Agricultural machinery and technology makes it possible to train specialists whose knowledge will be aimed at the mass introduction of modern technology and research within the framework of any agricultural production. The human factor has always been on the list of undesirable production conditions. Today it is possible to transfer the economy to a mechanical basis, reflecting the full power of modern technological aspects. Thus, there is a need for specialists in this field.