The views expressed in materials published on this page are those of the Coordinator-General and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the International Movement Global Citizens.
Where the State Ends
The state may be studied through three maps: roads, taxes, and schools. Roads show where it can reach. Taxes show where it can raise revenue. Schools show where it intends to remain.
Russia’s school map has changed markedly over the past quarter century. According to Education in Figures: 2026, a volume issued by the National Research University Higher School of Economics, 68,804 organizations provided primary, basic, or secondary general education in the 2000/01 academic year. By 2025/26, 37,965 remained. This represents a decline of 44.8%.
These are National Research University Higher School of Economics data drawn from official statistics, not a separate publication of the Ministry of Education. The distinction matters: official statistics require accuracy not only in the figures, but also in the name of the institution that collected and published them.
The rural network changed most significantly. The number of state and municipal rural schools fell from 45,475 to 20,664—a decrease of 24,811, or 54.6%. In urban areas, the corresponding figure declined from 22,694 to 16,319, or 28.1%. By contrast, the number of private schools rose from 635 to 982, but that increase was too small to alter the overall picture.
Demographics explain part of what occurred, but not all of it. Over the same period, the number of school students fell from 20.55 million to 17.78 million, a decline of 13.5%. The number of educational organizations therefore decreased more than three times as rapidly as the number of students.
These data do not establish that every organization that disappeared from the statistics was closed; mergers, reorganizations, and changes in organizational status are also possible. Nor can the motives behind the decisions be determined from a single table. The ratio, however, points to a sustained concentration of the school network.
Bureaucracy favors the word “optimization” because the word has no geography. A school always has geography.
In a large city, the merger of two institutions may remain an administrative matter. In a small community, a school is more than a place of instruction. It provides a permanent presence of public authority, supports employment, and connects families to the territory. A change in the school network therefore has political significance even when it is presented as an economic reorganization.
U.S. statistics present a different configuration. The comparison is not entirely symmetrical: the Russian indicator covers organizations under different forms of ownership that provide general education programs, whereas the U.S. table covers public schools. In addition, the latest comparable NCES data refer to the 2022/23 academic year, while the Russian data refer to 2025/26.
Nevertheless, the direction of change differs. According to the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics, the number of public schools rose from 93,273 in 2000/01 to 99,388 in 2022/23—an increase of approximately 6.6%. Public school enrollment increased from 47.2 million in fall 2000 to 49.6 million in fall 2022, or approximately 5.1%.
At the same time, the number of regular public school districts declined from 14,859 to 13,318, or 10.4%. The statistics do not explain the reasons for this decline and do not permit it to be attributed automatically to a policy of consolidation. They support a more cautious conclusion: the number of administrative units decreased while the number of schools increased.
Russia thus reduced primarily the network of organizations, especially in rural areas. In the United States, the national school network did not shrink, although the number of districts administering it declined. This does not by itself prove the superiority of one model over the other. It indicates that institutional contraction has different objects.
The Russian model affected the territorial presence of schools. U.S. statistics point primarily to changes in administrative structure. In the first case, the number of places in which an educational institution operates decreases. In the second, the number of authorities administering a network that remains intact or is expanding decreases.
Higher education requires even greater caution. In Russia, the number of organizations offering bachelor’s, specialist, and master’s degree programs fell from 965 in 2000/01 to 751 in 2025/26. Since 2020/21, however, the indicator has included research organizations offering master’s degree programs. The long-term series is therefore not fully consistent.
In the United States, the number of degree-granting higher education institutions participating in federal financial aid programs fell from 4,182 in 2000/01 to 3,896 in 2022/23. NCES methodological notes caution that the indicator is affected, among other things, by how branches are counted separately.
The number of universities, by itself, says almost nothing about the intellectual capacity of a system. There may be fewer institutions and more research.
That is precisely what occurred in the United States. According to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, research and development expenditures by U.S. universities rose from $30.1 billion in fiscal year 2000 to $108.8 billion in 2023. In constant 2017 dollars, the increase was from $41.4 billion to $89 billion—more than double. Federal sources provided 55% of university research expenditures in 2023.
These statistics do not prove that the U.S. government always makes proper use of academic expertise. Money can finance knowledge, but it cannot guarantee prudence in government. They show something else: research infrastructure can grow stronger even as the overall number of institutions declines.
An equivalent conclusion regarding Russia would require a separate series of official, comparable data on university research expenditures, their sources of funding, and government contracts for expert and analytical work. Without such a series, the assertion that the Russian academic world is “on the periphery” remains an assessment rather than an established statistical fact.
The institutional question nevertheless remains. Producing knowledge and enabling the authorities to use it are different functions of the state. A university can prepare analyses; the state must establish a system in which analysis competes with bureaucratic habit. Expertise sought only to validate a decision already made is not counsel, but decoration.
Education policy rarely produces an immediate political effect. Schools disappear from registers faster than their consequences fade from public life. A decision first appears to be an accounting matter, then a territorial one, and only later a political one.
The question, therefore, is not how many institutions the state has managed to merge. It is what degree of institutional density the state considers necessary for its own future. A state can reduce the number of schools by administrative decision. Reestablishing a school as a center of community, professional capacity, and trust is far more difficult.
The school map passes no judgment. It merely shows where the state continues to be present every day—and where it has left behind only reporting.
A future review of the education system should therefore be measured not by the number of new slogans, but by the willingness to answer an old question: what does the state regard as its duty—to maintain institutions, or to preserve the country’s civic and intellectual infrastructure?
A school can be closed within a single budget year. Reestablishing it is far more difficult.