I strongly suspect that the reason for the mushrooming university enrollment in Russia is that education now correlates with income, whereas in the Soviet days it did not.
Back to the original subject (of this digression) -- the social benefits system is a holy cow in Russia and it is political suicide to attack it. Yeltsin never dared. Putin tried to just modify it, and that led to huge protests (the only ones of the Putin era or the Medvedev era), which caused the Kremlin to annul its decision. If Putin with his 70-80% approval rating and a loyal Duma couldn't do it, no way could Yeltsin with his 8% approval rating and Communist-controlled Duma.
Really I think a lot of people read a narrative into the Russia of the 90s (and not just the Russia of the 90s -- lots of places) rather than looking at what actually happened. E.g. I believe that capitalists attack social safety nets. Russia in the 90s was capitalist. Therefore the capitalists must have attacked the social safety net in Russia. (The Yeltsin-era RF was more of a robber capitalist-central planning hybrid than it was capitalism in any developed sense anyway. Why were oligarchs going to care about the social safety net anyway? They were thieves, not businesspeople. *insert obligatory comment about how businesspeople are really thieves here*)
----- Original Message ---- From: "dredmond at efn.org" <dredmond at efn.org>
Yes, and this is a genuine reason to be hopeful. I was just reading UNESCO's Education for All 2010 report, and the expansion of the university system throughout the industrializing world is astounding. Per capita they're still catching up to the US, EU and Japan, but the absolute size of the student population has mushroomed. The numbers are here:
http://slorgzilla.blogspot.com/2010/02/education-for-all.html
-- DRR
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