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Where the State Ends
A school disappears twice. First, from the statistical register. Then, from a community’s sense of its own future. Government statistics record the first disappearance. The second raises a question about its social and political consequences.
A state leaves behind many maps. Roads show where it can reach. Taxes show where it draws its resources. Schools show where it intends to be present not occasionally, but every day.
Over the past quarter century, Russia’s school map has changed substantially. According to Education in Figures: 2026, 68,804 organizations provided primary, basic general, or secondary general education in the 2000–01 academic year. By 2025–26, that number had fallen to 37,965. The statistical record therefore contained 30,839 fewer educational organizations, a decline of 44.8 percent.
The collection draws on data from Rosstat, the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, the Situational Center of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation for Monitoring Education and Science, the Federal Treasury, the OECD, and UNESCO, as well as original work by the HSE Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge. It is a consolidated statistical portrait of Russian education, not the report of a single government agency.
The deepest changes occurred in rural areas. The number of state and municipal rural schools fell from 45,475 to 20,664—a decrease of 24,811, or 54.6 percent. In urban areas, the corresponding figure declined from 22,694 to 16,319, or 28.1 percent. The number of private schools rose from 635 to 982, but that increase could not alter the overall direction of the trend.
Over the same period, the number of students declined from 20.55 million to 17.78 million, or 13.5 percent. This comparison does not establish why the school network changed, but it shows that the number of educational organizations fell, in percentage terms, by more than three times the decline in enrollment. There were fewer students. There were far fewer educational organizations.
These figures do not mean that every organization that disappeared from the statistics physically closed its doors. Mergers, reorganizations, and changes in legal status may also have affected the measure. Nor do the statistics disclose the rationale for every administrative decision. The methodological cautions do not, however, erase the scale of the change: the school network recorded in the statistics became less extensive, with the sharpest decline occurring in rural areas.
In administrative language, changes of this kind are usually called “optimization.” It is a convenient word: It promises efficiency without naming the place that loses an institution. Optimization has no address. A school always does.
In a large city, merging two institutions may remain largely an administrative event. In a small community, the significance of a school may extend beyond its building and curriculum. It is one of the everyday places where a public institution is present; its fate may therefore extend beyond administrative reporting.
A school’s political significance does not lie in any ceremonial representation of the state. On the contrary, it represents the state routinely: every day, in the same place, for the same families. In political terms, it is this ordinary presence that matters—especially when it ceases.
American statistics present a different configuration. The comparison is not fully symmetrical: The Russian measure covers organizations of different forms of ownership that provide general education, whereas the corresponding American table counts public schools. The time frames also differ: Data from the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics extend through 2022–23, while the Russian data extend through 2025–26.
Even so, the direction of change is visible. In the United States, the number of public schools rose from 93,273 in 2000–01 to 99,388 in 2022–23—approximately 6.6 percent. Public school enrollment increased from 47.2 million in fall 2000 to 49.6 million in fall 2022, or about 5.0 percent.
At the same time, the number of regular public school districts fell from 14,859 to 13,318, a decline of 10.4 percent. The statistics do not explain the reasons for that reduction and do not justify automatically attributing it to a single policy of consolidation. They establish something else: There were fewer administrative units and more schools.
That is the central difference between the two processes. In Russia, it was primarily the network of educational organizations—especially in rural areas—that contracted. In the United States, the number of structures governing the network declined, but the national network of public schools itself did not.
In Russia, the statistics record a decline in the number of educational organizations. In the United States, they record a decline in the number of school districts alongside an increase in the number of public schools.
This does not prove the superiority of one system over the other. The number of schools says nothing by itself about instructional quality, building conditions, or student outcomes. But it does show which part of the system absorbs the reduction. In one case, it is the institution that works directly with the public. In the other, it is the administrative structure between the school and the state.
In higher education, simple counts become even less reliable. In Russia, the number of organizations offering bachelor’s, specialist, and master’s programs declined from 965 in 2000–01 to 751 in 2025–26. Beginning in 2020–21, however, the measure also includes research organizations offering master’s programs. The full time series therefore cannot be treated as completely uniform.
In the United States, the number of degree-granting higher education institutions participating in federal financial aid programs declined from 4,182 in 2000–01 to 3,896 in 2022–23. As the methodological notes of the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics caution, the figure is affected, among other things, by the separate treatment of branch campuses.
The number of universities matters, but it does not measure a nation’s intellectual capacity. There can be fewer institutions and more research. Buildings can be counted. A state’s capacity to produce and use knowledge requires a different measure.
American statistics reveal that distinction. Research and development expenditures by U.S. higher education institutions rose from $30.1 billion in fiscal year 2000 to $108.8 billion in fiscal year 2023. In constant 2017 dollars, the figure increased from $41.4 billion to $89 billion—more than doubling. Federal sources accounted for 55 percent of university research expenditures in 2023.
That funding does not guarantee sound public decisions. It creates the capacity to produce knowledge; it does not require public authorities to use that knowledge in policymaking. The U.S. data nevertheless show that a decline in the number of institutions need not be accompanied by weaker research activity: the number of institutions fell while research expenditures rose.
A comparable conclusion about Russia would require a separate series of official, methodologically comparable data on university research expenditures, their sources of funding, and government contracts for expert and analytical work. Without such a series, the position of Russia’s academic community within public administration may be assessed, but it cannot be treated as statistically established.
The central question nevertheless remains. Producing knowledge and enabling government to use knowledge are different functions of the state. A university can prepare calculations and expert assessments. The state must create a process in which they inform decisions rather than appear only after a decision has already been made. Expertise invited solely to validate a predetermined conclusion is not advice. It is decoration.
Education policy decisions may have delayed political consequences. At first, a change may appear primarily as an accounting action: an institution is merged, reorganized, or removed from a register. It may then acquire a territorial dimension and affect relations among the state, the local community, and the people for whom the school was part of everyday life.
That is why the issue is not how many institutions a state can merge or eliminate. The issue is what educational, civic, and intellectual infrastructure it considers necessary for its own future.
A state does not end only at its border. When the institutions through which people experience its daily presence disappear, their absence may be perceived as a retreat of the state from everyday life.
A school map does not deliver political verdicts. It allows a simpler and therefore more uncomfortable question to be asked: Where does the state remain close, and where is its daily presence gradually being replaced by reporting?
A future review of the education system should be judged not by the number of new slogans, but by the answer to an older question: What does the state regard as its responsibility—to reduce spending on institutions, or to preserve the country’s civic and intellectual infrastructure?
A school can be closed within a single budget year. Restoring it is considerably more difficult.