It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, September 03, 2025
Researchers examine student care culture in small Russian universities
National Research University Higher School of Economics
Researchers from the HSE Institute of Education conducted a sociological study at four small, non-selective universities and revealed, based on 135 interviews, the dual nature of student care at such institutions: a combination of genuine support with continuous supervision, reminiscent of parental care. This study offers the first in-depth look at how formal and informal student care practices are intertwined in the post-Soviet educational context. The study has been published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education.
In recent decades, universities have come to be viewed not only as places for learning and professional training, but also as environments that provide emotional support. In some countries, this shift is described as the therapeutic turn, as alongside academic objectives, universities begin to prioritise students’ psychological well-being. However, in certain cases, supportive care is accompanied by excessive supervision and restrictions on students’ autonomy.
Small non-selective universities in Russia, especially in the periphery, have received little attention in this context. Many of them evolved from former teacher training institutes and continue to play a key role in meeting the educational needs of entire regions. By non-selective universities, the researchers refer to institutions where the average Unified State Exam (USE) admission score is below 70. In the universities examined in this study, it ranges from 60.28 to 66.8. These institutions have lower USE entry requirements than major research universities and enrol many first-generation students. Despite the important social role of such universities, little is known about their internal culture and the daily lives of students. The authors of this study aimed to fill this gap by closely examining how students are cared for in these universities.
Conducted between 2022 and 2024, the research focused on four public universities located in the Altai Republic, Altai Krai, Kamchatka Krai, and Ivanovo Oblast. These institutions enrol between 799 and 2,334 full-time students, with a student–faculty ratio of 10:1 to 16:1, lower than that of major universities.
The researchers observed university life and conducted 135 semi-structured interviews with students, faculty, and administrators, including department heads, deans, and vice rectors. The interviews addressed a broad range of topics, from the educational process and participation in extracurricular activities to personal future plans. Questions about care and support were not asked directly; instead, these themes emerged as participants described the campus atmosphere and their everyday relationships. The researchers observed frequent use of expressions such as children, second family, and like at home, which helped identify the key characteristics of the university culture.
The results revealed a pervasive duality of student care practiced at the universities studied. On one hand, faculty members focus on creating a warm and friendly atmosphere: they know their students by name, take an interest in their lives, and are willing to assist with both academic and personal matters. On the other hand, in the absence of dedicated student support services, faculty members often take on mentoring roles: they explain institutional rules, help resolve conflicts, and support students in difficult situations.
Care and support often take the form of continuous monitoring. The 'grown-ups' track attendance, oversee dormitory behaviour, contact parents, or hold 'parent–teacher conferences.' Even students who are legally adults are treated as 'children' in need of guidance. Notably, all faculty members involved provide this care without additional compensation, which may be influenced by gendered traditions in the teaching profession, as most faculty at the universities studied are women.
In interviews, students often liken the university to their family and faculty members to their parents or 'second mums.' While this can foster trust, it also reinforces a model in which students do not fully transition to independence, continuing instead to live in a system of control reminiscent of secondary school.
'We have shown that in small, non-selective universities, caring for students involves both support and control. These forms are not contradictory but together create a stable system of relationships that largely holds the university community together,' summarises Tatiana Akuneeva, Research Assistant at the Laboratory for University Development of the HSE Institute of Education (IOE).
'These universities combine trusting, emotionally warm relationships between students and faculty with elements of strict supervision, including behaviour monitoring and parental involvement. While this model can promote cohesion and stability within the university community, it also reinforces student dependence and extends a school-like experience,' notes Ksenia Romanenko, Expert at the IOE Laboratory for University Development.
Economists from HSE University and the Southern Federal University have found that personality traits such as conscientiousness and open-mindedness help schoolchildren improve their academic performance. The study, conducted across seven countries, was the first large-scale international analysis of the impact of character traits on the academic achievement of 10 and 15-year-olds. The findings have been published in the International Journal of Educational Research.
A child’s school performance can indicate their future educational level, income, and social status. Traditionally, when assessing academic success, the focus has been on cognitive abilities such as memory, logic, and attention.
However, good academic results require more than intelligence. The researchers hypothesised that pupils’ personality traits—such as conscientiousness, openness to new experiences, emotional stability, and the ability to cooperate—could also play a role. To test this, Ksenia Rozhkova, Senior Research Fellow at HSE’s Faculty of Economic Sciences, and Karen Avanesyan, Leading Researcher at SFU’s Academy of Psychology and Pedagogy, analysed data from the OECD Survey for Social and Emotional Skills, conducted in 2019 among schoolchildren in seven countries (Russia, the USA, South Korea, Finland, Turkey, China, and Colombia).
The study examined data from over 44,000 students in two age groups: 10-year-olds and 15-year-olds. The survey assessed the development of pupils’ personality traits, focusing on the Big Five non-cognitive skills: open-mindedness, conscientiousness, extraversion, cooperation, and neuroticism (or emotional instability). These traits are shaped in childhood under the influence of family and environment and tend to persist throughout much of life.
The study showed that conscientiousness and open-mindedness had the most significant positive effects on academic achievement. An increase of one standard deviation in conscientiousness raised the likelihood of being among the top 25% of students by 4 percentage points. This trait encompasses self-discipline, perseverance in completing tasks, and striving for the best possible outcome. Conscientiousness proved important across all cultural contexts. ‘We see that non-cognitive skills have similar effects on academic outcomes in different cultural contexts. In all countries where such empirical studies have been conducted, conscientiousness and emotional stability consistently show a positive impact on educational and labour-market outcomes,’ noted Ksenia Rozhkova, Senior Research Fellow at the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences.
The second most influential trait was openness to new experiences, open-mindedness, which increased the likelihood by 2.5 percentage points. An intriguing effect was observed with cooperation and willingness to compromise: it followed an inverted U-shaped trend. Cooperation improved academic performance up to an optimal point, after which excessive willingness to collaborate began to reduce the chances of being in the top 25%. According to the authors, this aligns with a psychological phenomenon sometimes referred to as a ‘too good’ trait, where certain socially approved behaviours can start to work against the individual. ‘Perhaps this is due to the difficulty of finding the right balance between individual motivation to tackle tasks and the ability to work as part of a team,’ explained Ksenia Rozhkova.
The authors paid particular attention to how personality traits influence the academic performance of children from different social backgrounds. Numerous studies have shown that school achievement is strongly linked to a family’s financial situation and social status, which account for nearly 20% of the variation in grades.
Being in the bottom 40% of households by income level reduced a pupil’s chances of becoming one of the top students by 12.5 percentage points. However, when the researchers created a model factoring in the impact of personality traits, the likelihood of a child from a low-income family ranking among the best students dropped by only 10.7 percentage points. This suggests that fostering such traits could become one of the key drivers of social mobility, helping to mitigate economic inequality and enabling children from less affluent families to achieve better academic and life outcomes.
The authors emphasise that these findings carry significant implications for education policy. They demonstrate that developing personality traits can serve as an effective tool for reducing educational inequality. Importantly, such qualities can be successfully cultivated through school curricula and educational initiatives.
Many companies try to use incentive systems to increase the motivation and effectiveness of their employees. These systems often resemble competitions: for example, whoever has the highest sales figures at the end of the month receives a bonus.
Such competitions can certainly increase productivity. But they also have a downside: scientific studies have shown that they can, for example, worsen cooperation between colleagues in the short term.
But what happens in the long term to people who are exposed to such competitive pressure over a longer period of time? Do they get used to the competitive pressure, or does it even change their personality?
A team led by Professor Fabian Kosse from Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) in Würzburg has now investigated these very questions for the first time: ‘We studied how a prolonged competitive environment influences the prosocial behaviour of young people, i.e. their willingness to help and their mutual trust,’ says Kosse, who heads the JMU Chair of Data Science in Business and Economics.
Helpfulness and Trust Decline
The results of the study give pause for thought: two years of intense competition significantly reduce helpfulness and trust among young people. And not just in the short term – even four years after the end of the competition, the effects are still there. ‘So prolonged competition not only changes situational behaviour. It also influences personality development,’ says Kosse.
The study was conducted in collaboration with Ranjita Rajan from the Karta Initiative (Oxford) and Michela Tincani from University College London. It has been published in the renowned Journal of the European Economic Association.
How the Results Were Obtained
The researchers conducted a large-scale field study at schools in Chile. According to Fabian Kosse, the quantity and quality of the available educational data there is very good.
For the study, the scientists used a programme introduced by the Chilean government (PACE). It was implemented at selected high schools to bring more young people from socially disadvantaged families to universities.
The programme guarantees a place at university for the top 15 percent of students in each school. Those who belong to this group no longer have to take the otherwise mandatory central entrance exam for universities. This is very important for young people from socially disadvantaged families, as very few of them make it to university through the regular, centralised admission system.
The incentive to be among the top 15 percent is therefore strong. However, the long-term competition that the programme sparks in schools is also strong: it is a competition that lasts two years, because who is among the best is not decided by a single final exam, but by all their performance over the last school years.
Against this background, the researchers were active at 64 PACE schools and 64 control schools where the PACE programme is not in place. A total of more than 5,000 students were involved. Crucial to the validity of the results was the fact that the schools participating in the PACE programme and those serving as control schools were selected at random – in other words, it was a genuine experiment with treatment and control groups.
For their study, the researchers evaluated data collected by the Chilean government to evaluate the PACE programme. They also conducted detailed surveys of students, teachers and school administrators that they developed themselves.
The questions concerned the school atmosphere and included, for example, ‘How much do you agree with the following statement: There is a lot of competition for the best grades in my class.’ Above all, the questions focused on prosocial behaviour such as altruism, reciprocity and trust (‘How willing are you to help others without expecting anything in return?’).
What can be Done to Counteract the Negative Consequences?
In its publication, the team proposes measures that could potentially prevent or reduce the prosociality reducing consequences of PACE and similar competition-based incentive systems.
Change the rules of the competition: It might help to determine the ranking of the best students not within a specific school, but within the group of all socially disadvantaged students in a specific region of the country. In such a system, the internal competitive pressure within the school would be lower.
Creating cooperation instead of competition: If the competition takes place across schools, the resulting mindset of ‘us together against the other schools’ could improve cooperation and atmosphere and even increase prosociality.
Dramatic population change: Analysis of genome-wide data from more than 550 ancient individuals demonstrates that, during the 6th-8th centuries CE, Eastern Germany, Poland/Ukraine, and the Northern Balkans experienced a major shift in ancestry, with over 80 percent originating from eastern European newcomers.
Support from other analysis: An independent study of 18 genomes from the South Moravian region linked to one of the first Slavic-speaking polities confirms this pattern.
Regional differences: While genetic turnover was nearly complete in the north, regions like the Balkans saw more mixing between Eastern European incomers and local communities. This diversity of ancestries persists until today in the modern populations of these areas.
Integration, not conquest: Genetic evidence shows no sex bias in the migration—entire families and communities seemed to have moved and integrated, rather than just male warriors.
Flexible social structure: In Eastern Germany, the migrants brought a new way of social organization, visible in the formation of large patrilinear pedigrees—a stark contrast to the much smaller family units typical of the preceding Migration Period. Meanwhile, in Croatia, early immigrant communities appear to have maintained more traditional or regionally continuous social structures, with less dramatic changes from the patterns seen before the demographic shift.
The spread of the Slavs stands as one of the most formative yet least understood events in European history. Starting in the 6th century CE, Slavic groups began to appear in the written records of Byzantine and Western sources, settling lands from the Baltic to the Balkans, and from the Elbe to the Volga. Yet, in stark contrast to the famous migrations of Germanic tribes like the Goths or Langobards or the legendary conquests of the Huns, the Slavic story has long been a difficult puzzle for historians of the European Middle Ages.
This is partly because early Slavic communities left behind rather little for archaeologists to find: they practiced cremation, built simple houses, and produced plain, undecorated pottery. Perhaps most significantly, they did not leave behind written records of their own for several centuries. As a result, the term “Slavs” itself has been ambiguous, sometimes imposed by outside chroniclers and often mis-used in later nationalist or ideological debates. Where did these people come from, and how did they so thoroughly change the cultural and linguistic map of Europe?
Historians have long debated whether the spread of Slavic material culture and language was driven by a mass migration of people, the gradual “Slavicisation” of local populations, or a combination of both. But the evidence was thin—especially in the crucial early centuries, when cremation made DNA studies nearly impossible and archaeological traces were modest.
How the Slavs transformed Europe
Now, an international research team of researchers from Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechia and Croatia led by the HistoGenes consortium has provided answers with the first comprehensive ancient DNA study of medieval Slavic populations. By sequencing over 550 ancient genomes, the team has revealed that the rise of the Slavs was, at its core, a story of people on the move. Their genetic signatures point to an origin in the region stretching from southern Belarus to central Ukraine—a geographic area that matches what many linguistic and archaeological reconstructions had long suggested. "While direct evidence from early Slavic core regions is still rare, our genetic results offer the first concrete clues to the formation of Slavic ancestry—pointing to a likely origin somewhere between the Dniester and Don rivers" says Joscha Gretzinger, a geneticist from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and lead author of the study.
The data show that, beginning in the 6th century CE, large-scale migrations carried this Eastern European ancestry across wide areas of Central and Eastern Europe, which caused the genetic makeup of regions like Eastern Germany and Poland to shift almost entirely. Yet the expansion did not follow the model of conquest and empire: Instead of sweeping armies and rigid hierarchies, the migrants built their new societies on flexible communities, often organized around extended families and patrilineal kinship ties. Also, this was not a single, uniform model across all regions. In Eastern Germany, the shift was profound: large, multi-generational pedigrees became the backbone of society, with kinship networks more extensive and structured than the small nuclear families seen in the preceding Migration Period. In contrast, in areas such as Croatia, the arrival of Eastern European groups brought much less disruption to existing social patterns. Here, social organization often retained many features of earlier periods, resulting in communities where new and old traditions blended or persisted side by side. This regional diversity in social structure highlights how the spread of Slavic groups was not a one-size-fits-all process, but rather a dynamic transformation that adapted to local contexts and histories.
“Rather than a single people moving as one, the Slavic expansion was not a monolithic event but a mosaic of different groups, each adapting and blending in its own way—suggesting there was never just one ‘Slavic’ identity, but many.” explains Zuzana Hofmanová from the MPI EVA and Masaryk University in Brno, Czechia, one of the senior lead authors of the study. Notably, the genetic record reveals no significant sex bias in these migrations: entire families moved together, and both men and women contributed equally to the emerging societies. More data will show in the upcoming years how each community adapted, integrated, or reinvented itself in response to both migration and its own local history.
Spotlight on Eastern Germany
In Eastern Germany specifically, the genetic data show an especially striking story. Following the decline of the Thuringian kingdom, more than 85 percent of the ancestry in the region can be attributed to new arrivals from the East. This marks a shift from the earlier Migration Period, when the population was a cosmopolitan mix as best illustrated by the site of Brücken, a richly furnished late antique cemetery from Sachsen Anhalt that displayed a mix of Northern, Central and Southern European ancestry. With the spread of the Slavs, this diversity gave way to a population profile almost identical to modern Slavic-speaking groups in Eastern Europe. Archaeological evidence from cemeteries confirms that these new communities organized themselves around large extended families and patrilineal descent—while women of marriageable age typically left their home villages to join new households elsewhere. Notably, the genetic legacy of these early Eastern European settlers endures today among the Sorbs, a Slavic-speaking minority in Eastern Germany. Despite centuries of surrounding cultural and linguistic change, the Sorbs have retained a genetic profile closely related to the early medieval Slavic populations that settled the region more than 1,000 years ago.
Spotlight on Poland
In Poland specifically, the research overturns earlier ideas of long-term population continuity. Genetic results show that starting in the 6th and 7th centuries CE, the region’s earlier inhabitants—descendants of populations with strong links to Northern Europe and Scandinavia in particular—almost entirely disappeared and were successively replaced by newcomers from the East, who are closely related to modern Poles, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. This conclusion is reinforced by the analysis of some of the earliest known Slavic inhumation graves in Poland, excavated at the site of Gródek, which provide rare and direct evidence of these early migrants. While the population shift was overwhelming, the genetic evidence also reveals minor traces of mixing with local populations. These findings underscore both the scale of population change and the complex dynamics that shaped the roots of today’s Central and Eastern European linguistic landscape.
Spotlight on Croatia
The Northern Balkans specifically present a different pattern compared to the northern immigration area—a story of both change and continuity. Ancient DNA from Croatia and neighboring regions reveals a significant influx of Eastern European-related ancestry, but not a complete genetic replacement. Instead, Eastern European migrants mixed with the region’s diverse local populations, creating new, hybrid communities. Genetic analyses indicate that in present-day Balkan populations, the proportion of this incoming Eastern European ancestry varies considerably but often makes up roughly half or even less of the modern gene pool, highlighting the region’s complex demographic history. The formation of such a mixed community is clearly seen at the site of Velim, where some of the oldest Slavic burials in the region show evidence of both Eastern European migrants and up to 30% local ancestry. Here, the Slavic migration was not a wave of conquest but a long process of intermarriage and adaptation, resulting in the cultural, linguistic and genetic diversity that still characterizes the Balkan Peninsula today.
Independent confirmation in Moravia, Czechia
In an independent study at the same time today published in Genome Biology, supported among others by Czech projects FORMOR and RES-HUM, researchers from Czechia, Germany, Switzerland and UK with a senior leader of Dr. Zuzana Hofmanová found that there was also a population change in Southern Moravia (Czechia) and that also this demographic shift can be linked to the change to the Slavic-associated material culture which originated in modern-day Ukraine. While whole genomes of preceding, Migration-period individuals showed a large genetic diversity, individuals linked with the Slavic-related cultural horizons had affinities to Northeastern Europe, a feature that was not present before.This dataset included an individual, an infant, buried within a very early Slavic context usually only linked to cremations thus narrowing regionally the change in time and associating it to the Prague-Korchak culture. Importantly, the same genetic signal was present not only for individuals from 7th and 8th centuries but was regionally continuous to 9th and 10th century when this region is associated to one of the earliest Slavic polities, Moravian principality, known because of Saints Cyril and Methodius and the first literary Slavic language (Old Church Slavonic) and Glagolithic script they created for their mission among the Moravian Slavs.
A new chapter in European history
This study does not just resolve the historical puzzle how one of the world's largest linguistic and cultural groups came to be. It also offers new perspectives on why Slavic groups spread so successfully, and why they left so few traces of the kinds historians once sought: As medievalist Walter Pohl, one of the senior lead authors of the study, puts it, the Slavic migration represents a fundamentally different model of social organization: “a demic diffusion or grass-root movement, often in small groups or temporary alliances, settling new territories without imposing a fixed identity or elite structures.” Their success may have been due not to conquest but to a pragmatic, egalitarian lifestyle—one that avoided the heavy burdens and hierarchies of the crumbling Roman world. In many places, the Slavs offered a credible alternative to the declining empires around them. Their social resilience, relatively simple subsistence economy, and willingness to adapt made them well-suited to periods of instability, whether caused by climate change or plague.
The new genetic findings support this interpretation. Mostly where early Slavic groups are found in the archaeological and historical record, their genetic traces match: a common ancestral origin, but regional differences shaped by the degree of mixing with local populations. In the north, earlier Germanic peoples had largely moved away, leaving room for Slavic settlement. In the south, the Eastern European newcomers merged with established communities. This patchwork process explains the remarkable diversity found in the cultures, languages, and even the genetics of today’s Central and Eastern Europe. "The spread of the Slavs was likely the last demographic event of continental scale to permanently and fundamentally reshape both the genetic and linguistic landscape of Europe." says Johannes Krause, director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and one of the senior authors of the study.
With these new results, researchers can finally see beyond the gaps in the written and archaeological record to trace the true scope of the Slavic migrations—one of the most influential yet understated chapters in Europe’s past. The echoes of this history remain today, in the languages, cultures, and even the DNA of millions across the continent.
Undisturbed burial of an adult woman with genetic markers indicating local origin. Grave goods: glass bead jewelry and a cowrie shell amulet. Pre-Slavic cemetery of Brücken, feature 13913:29.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Children with sickle cell disease are more likely to have dental problems — but fewer than half of those covered by Michigan Medicaid got dental care in 2022, according to a new study.
The findings, led by Michigan Medicine and non-profit RAND Corporation, appear in JAMA Network Open.
“Sickle cell disease is known to increase the risk of dental complications in children, which underscores the importance of preventive dental care for this population,” said senior author Sarah Reeves, Ph.D., M.P.H., an associate professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at the U-M Medical School and the Susan B. Meister Child Health Evaluation and Research (CHEAR) Center.
“Our findings show that we need to take steps to make sure kids with this condition get the dental care they need—by helping dentists feel more prepared to treat them and making sure doctors know how important dental health is for these children."
Sickle cell disease is an inherited blood disorder that affects roughly 2,000 newborns a year in the U.S. It affects red blood cells, causing them to become misshapen and block blood flow, which can lead to pain, strokes, and other serious health problems.
Dental health is particularly important for children with the condition because of its reciprocal relationship with the disease, Reeves says. Infections cause inflammation and stress in the body, which can lead to the sickling of red blood cells.
“Oral infections are especially dangerous for people with sickle cell disease because they can trigger or worsen symptoms and serious complications,” Reeves said.
“Preventative dental care helps reduce the risk of pain crises and hospitalizations.”
Researchers analyzed use of dental care for 1,096 children with both sickle cell disease and Michigan Medicaid, and 1.18 million children with Michigan Medicaid.
More than 40% of children in both groups were aged 6-14 years. Children with sickle cell disease in Michigan have comparable rates of dental service utilization to the general pediatric Medicaid population. Overall, less than half of children with or without out sickle cell disease and Medicaid received any type of dental care, including preventive services and treatment.
Reeves said several factors limit access to dental care for children with sickle cell disease, including a shortage of dentists who accept Medicaid and a lack of clear guidelines for treating these patients.
The study highlights the need for targeted solutions, she says, such as better provider training and stronger communication between medical and dental professionals to ensure children with the condition get the care they need.
“Given increased risk of oral health problems among patients with sickle cell disease we need focused efforts to expand access to dental services for them,” she said.
“There are many reasons why dental care rates are low in this group. Future research should look at what those barriers are and how we can overcome them to improve care for this vulnerable population.”
Journal
JAMA Network Open
Article Title
Sickle cell disease and dental care for children with Medicaid
