Russian polls: Secondary professional education is good as higher education

Russians recognize that higher education guarantees success in life although many say that its importance is overestimated and a secondary professional educations diploma is no less good as far as possible incomes are concerned, according to public opinion polls conducted by the All-Russia Public Opinion Centre (VCIOM). The poll results demonstrated that the majority of Russians believed that higher education was a guarantee of success. As many as 72 percent of the polled said they believed that that higher education ensured a successful career and made it easier to reach goals of life. At the same time, many of the polled tended to think that the importance of a university diploma was overestimated, since it was quite possible to build a successful career without any (the number of people thinking that way increased from 45 to 54 percent). Half of the polled (51 percent) said they disagreed with the thesis that a person was doomed to have a low-wage job if he or she had no university diploma. More than half of respondents (52 percent) also said they disagreed that any means were acceptable to earn a university degree and that money, whatever big, did not matter as far as a university diploma was concerned (57 percent). Many Russians believed that secondary professional education was quite competitive with higher education. Thus, 70 percent of the polled said that a holder of a secondary professional education diploma could earn even more than a university graduate. As Many 65 percent said that secondary professional education was no inferior to higher education, although it was often underestimated. However, the opinion of university graduates somewhat differed from that of the majority of Russians. Thus, 48 percent of holders of higher education diplomas said people did not have such a diploma were destined to have a low-income and non-qualified job (the average figure is 42 percent). Such respondents tended to say that they would spare no money to have a university diploma (38 percent against 30 percent in average). Moreover, the bulk of them disagreed that secondary professional education was on a par with higher education in terms of quality (57 percent against 65 percent in average).