Children from families with high professional and educational status are twice as likely to enter a prestigious university as their peers from low-resource families, HSE University researchers have found. The ‘privileged’ adolescents benefit from strong family attitudes towards a good education, parental investment in their studies and the high academic performance associated with it. At the same time, even when they have good grades, students from poorly educated families do not even try to get into prestigious universities.

Is a political scientist a true scientist and should political scientists be categorised as either theoreticians or practitioners? Why is Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’ a ‘must read’ and is there any point in communicating with someone who has stopped learning? Can a modern university fence itself off from the world around it, and what does critical thinking have to do with it? These are some of the subjects we touch on in our conversation with Alexei Chesnakov, School of Politics and Governance professor with the Faculty of Social Sciences.

The year 2019 ended with an important event: Russia approved its first national standards for artificial intelligence. Starting in September 2020, AI-based smart systems will need to comply with these new regulations. It is far more difficult, however, to regulate people's attitudes towards such systems. People tend to fear and idolise AI, but should they really? Henry Penikas, Assistant Professor of the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences, discusses why they probably shouldn't and how algorithms can be fooled.