RosNOU state accreditation to become indefinite

On July 1, 2021, Federal Law No. 170-FZ "On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation in Connection with the Adoption of the Federal Law "On State Control (Supervision) and Municipal Control in the Russian Federation""comes into force.

The changes also affected the accreditation process: part 16 of Article 136 states that educational programs that have state accreditation as of March 1, 2022, will be considered to have state accreditation indefinitely. This change will take effect on March 1, 2022:

"...The core educational programs that have state accreditation as of March 1, 2022, related to the appropriate level of education or an enlarged group of professions, specialties and areas of training, are considered to have state accreditation indefinitely, with the exception of state-accredited basic educational programs implemented by foreign educational organizations that carry out educational activities outside the territory of the Russian Federation" (translation from Russian, from the text of the law in the Rossiyskaya Gazeta).

The certificate of state accreditation of the Russian New University (link in Russian) is valid until March 24, 2022, so the accreditation of RosNOU will become indefinite from March 1, 2022.

- Arrangements to undergo an accreditation process are a long, complex and painstaking process. It affects the entire staff of the university from the personnel department to the heads of structural divisions and the rector: it is necessary to prepare a very large number of documents, — said Igor Darda, Vice-rector for Quality of Education and Accreditation of RosNOU. —The document submission process’s significant complexity consists of scanning a significant number of papers, since the pandemic switched the accreditation process to a remote format. Indefinite accreditation is very well. Nevertheless, any phenomenon, like a coin, has two sides. The indicators for the state accreditation of new educational programs after March 2022, as well as the supervision and control of educational organizations by the state, have not yet been determined. It is not clear what requirements a university should meet and what indicators of its activity the management of an educational organization should pay attention to. The state of uncertainty creates a large number of risks for an educational organization, since the basis of control and supervisory measures in the future will be a risk-oriented approach, but today there is no regulatory framework regulating it. Therefore, the university staff continues to conduct internal control over the availability and completeness of educational and methodological documentation necessary to ensure a high-quality educational process.

Another document without which the work of the university is impossible — a license for educational activities (link in Russian) — became indefinite several years ago.