Ural Federal University: University is the Leader in the Number of Students Enrolled Last Year

The Ural Federal University has become the leader of Russian higher education in terms of the number of students admitted in 2021. According to the results of the last admission campaign, 12,876 people were admitted to the university on a state-funded and on the basis of contracts in all forms of study and at the all branches of the university.

7,616 of them were enrolled to full-time Bachelor’s and Specialist’s degree programs in Ekaterinburg on a state-funded and contract basis. The Higher School of Economics, supported by the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia, presented the results of monitoring the quality of admission to state-funded and contract-based programs at Russian universities in 2021.

“This is really a very important achievement for us, considering that in 2020 we were only in fourth place. In recent years, we have been steadily increasing our enrollment, and this is especially noticeable in Ekaterinburg, with 1,689 more full-time students enrolled on a contract basis compared to 2020. Of course, this also imposes a special responsibility on us. We will do our best to maintain the high quality of education, which is an absolute priority for us,” says Victor Koksharov, Rector of UrFU.

In addition, the Ural Federal University managed to make a great leap forward in terms of budgetary enrollment. Having accepted 4,422 full-time students in Ekaterinburg in 2021 (717 more than in 2020), the university also managed to take the first place in the country, getting ahead of the Moscow State University.

There is also a positive trend in admission on a contract basis – here UrFU climbed from the eighth to the fourth place, having accepted 3,184 full-time contract students (972 more than in 2020). Only the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, the Higher School of Economics, and the RUDN University are ahead of it.

“The Government has added state-funded places to increase the availability of education, precisely in the regions and in the priority areas. We can see that education has become more accessible, and this reflects the normality of the situation. Applicants entered universities fairly and competitively. The average score for the United State Examination dropped slightly, and if last year they would not have entered, this year they have the opportunity to do so. In general, we can see that, despite the increase in the number of state-funded places, the quality of admission has not fallen, we have not recorded a single failure of any Russian university,” commented Yaroslav Kuzminov, research director of the Higher School of Economics.

In 2021, the monitoring covered 838 universities, including 404 head state universities, 345 branches and 89 non-state universities. These are almost all participants of the higher education market with full-time education (without law enforcement and creative universities, in which the USE results are not a key selection criteria).