Online Campus of HSE University Sets New Admissions Record
HSE University has announced the results of its 2023/24 online admissions campaign. The university, which leads in CIS countries in terms of the number of online programmes (three bachelor’s and 18 master’s), has once again attracted the most students this year with a total of 1,750 admissions.
In 2020, HSE University became the first in Russia to launch an English-taught online degree programme, the Master of Data Science, and has since continued to expand its portfolio of online offerings. The university's focus on providing comprehensive academic programmes has led to a doubling of online student enrolment each year, from 231 students admitted in 2020 to 1,750 in 2023. Currently, over 2,800 students are learning at HSE University online. Additionally, the percentage of fee-paying master's students studying online has increased from 27% last year to 36% this year.
Search engine analysis revealed that in 2023, the demand for online programmes grew by 40% compared to 2022. Since the beginning of this year, the frequency of searches for ‘HSE online’ has grown by 40%. For the second year in a row, HSE University has been Russia’s most popular university in combination with searches for ‘online bachelor’s’ and ‘online master’s’.
Over half of admissions are students aged 20 to 24, with 10% under 20, 14% aged 25 to 29, and the rest being over 30. eLearning at HSE University is interesting not only to recent graduates in search of a relevant profession, but to experienced professionals, top executives, business owners, and start-up creators. They want to update their competences, gain access to the university’s research expertise, and obtain feedback from programme partner companies such as SBERLAB, Intel, AIRI, Xperience.ai, Huawei, Yandex, 1C and others. The syllabi and optional tracks of programmes have been developed with the participation of key employers in accordance with their needs. Students solve cases and enrich their portfolios with projects implemented as part of business labs, workshops and internships supervised by industry experts from different countries.
Yulia Remezova, Director for eLearning
‘The online campus has a lot of tasks to solve. We want to maintain our leadership in the online degree market and to continue setting trends in this sphere. We are working to increase customer focus by developing a comfortable digital environment, which includes the quality of educational products, variability of study tracks, and supporting the global community of HSE University’s online students and graduates. We not only “enliven” online studies for them, developing communication channels and providing continuous feedback from teachers, but we also create new platforms for individualisation as part of HSE’s digital ecosystem. For example, we presented a prototype of the online campus in a metaverse, where students can choose avatars and build virtual worlds.’
The most popular areas of study at the HSE University online campus are computer science (34% of all students), management with business informatics (27%), economics and finance (17%) and design (16%).
Top four online programmes by number of students:
1. Master of Data Science (English-taught)
2. Digital Product Management
3. Machine Learning and Data-Intensive Systems
4. Bachelor’s in Design
The new enrolees at HSE Online include 51 international students from China, the USA, Peru, Haiti, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Mexico, Moldova, Greece, Turkey, and other countries. Over 39% of students live in Moscow and the Moscow region but have chosen to study online. The online programmes meet students’ need to study without leaving their workplaces and families and without interfering with travel or business trips. HSE Online offers an unprecedented opportunity to combine all aspects of a full life, learn from anywhere in the world, from any time zone, and tailor one’s educational trajectory.
HSE Online Day, an inaugural ceremony for first-year online students, will take place on October 17 from 6 pm to 8:30 pm, Moscow time. The participants will get to know the campus, gain some career insights, and take part in a live coaching session.
Ekaterina Zinkovskaya