Susan Jacoby

The Soviet system of higher education was quite different from that of the United States. Although only a few high school graduates were admitted to college, their tuition was heavily subsidized by the government. Unlike most U.S. college students, they did not study the "liberal arts," whereby students get an excellent general education by learning a little about a wide range of topics. Rather, they were enrolled in "specialist" curriculums that trained them to do a certain job but offered very few courses outside their area of concentration.

In the early 1970s, Susan Jacoby, an American education journalist, talked at length with a number of Soviet citizens while visiting Moscow. In this selection she summarizes her conversations with Tanya, a nineteen-year-old Russian college student who lives and attends school in Kazakhstan, one of the non-Russian republics in Central Asia...