Reform higher education’s old system of privileges

The last time Ukrainian cities faced occupation and artillery bombing was during World War II. That was until this spring, when Russia annexed Crimea and started to supply rebels who have occupied large cities in the East of Ukraine. This has changed everyday life for millions of Ukrainian citizens, among them thousands of school-leavers who want to enter university.

This year’s admissions campaign is the most difficult one since the very beginning of Ukrainian independence in 1991. The government has lost all possibilities of conducting external independent testing, or EIT, in Crimea and in major parts of the Donbas region.

While Crimeans who express their will to enter Ukrainian universities outside the peninsula had the opportunity to pass the EIT in the nearest region to them, approximately 40% of school-leavers from Donbas had no such chance due to threats from the rebels.

Since in almost every university, entrance rankings – which define who will study free of charge – are mainly based on the results of the EIT, those who didn’t have opportunity to sit the EIT were given permission to apply through entrance exams.

That was not an easy decision for the government as the EIT was designed to replace the corrupt system that exams created. Unfortunately, wartime will only increase the risk of bribes being used during the entrance exams.

Postponement

The beginning of the academic year in occupied Donbas was postponed for one month and will start in October. In fact, nobody is sure whether it will be possible to start the academic year even in October so there is an urgent need to create a plan B for more than 50 higher education institutions.

As for Crimeans, parliament adopted a law that allows Crimean applicants to study free of charge in any Ukrainian university despite the EIT results. Nearly 600 Crimeans will use this opportunity, which is 4% of all Crimean school-leavers.

Apart from this, during the spring semester almost 1,700 Crimean students changed their place of study, mostly in favour of higher education institutions in Kyiv, Lviv and Odesa.

However, some waited until the end of the academic year to transfer. Experts suggest that many of those who wanted to enter university outside the peninsula were forced to abandon their decision under pressure from new local governors.

So the Ukrainian parliament’s decision on entrance privileges was definitely a political move to support citizens during the occupation of the peninsula. The move seems to have won unanimous support and there is a common desire to support Crimeans.

Privilege

Simultaneously, one might expect that during hard times old problems would strike with redoubled force. Media commentators and experts have focused on the issue of how certain groups continue to be privileged in terms of admission to university.

According to the law, the list of such groups is quite long – each Ukrainian government added a new one in order to win votes at elections or to temporarily freeze certain social conflicts.

That is why in addition to orphans and people with disabilities this privileged list also contains miners’ children or people who somehow were harmed by the consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe.

Universities have the right to fix the number of free-of-charge places for such categories, which can be up to 25% of the intake for each programme.

Unfortunately, there has been no research on the effectiveness of such policies.

On the one hand, the majority of people with disabilities cannot use their right due to a lack of specific architectural conditions, training materials, specially trained teachers and social workers. However, people often fake documents to gain their privileged entrance rights.

It is clear that such a system is very bad at providing access to higher education for under-represented groups. Recent higher education reforms decreased the total number of free-of-charge places for such groups by up to 5%.

Still, it is a big task to make reforms that ensure underrepresented groups are targeted more effectively. Moreover, the government needs to measure how the reforms help, especially in the long term: whether these groups become dependent on them or whether it makes them more self-sufficient and able to live on their own.

Scholarships

Another example of questionable social support is student scholarships.

For example, this year the Ministry of Education has given US$460 million for them – 29% of the cost of all free-of-charge places. There are two types of scholarship: academic, for those who are academically able, and social support. Both of them have ill-defined goals.

Social scholarships are similar to the privilege issue – they go to the same groups of people. Academic scholarships are a real mystery: their goal is to encourage students to study well. At the same time, it is enough to have an average B mark to get a scholarship.

The scholarship is US$60 a month, which is definitely not enough to live in any Ukrainian city where you can find a university. Consequently, it encourages students to get just average grades and covers only a tiny part of their costs.

Another paradox is that academic scholarships are available only for those students who study free-of-charge, which is rather discriminatory towards those who pay tuition fees.

There is a strong need to reconsider the purpose of scholarships. Firstly, all students should be afforded the possibility of getting an academic scholarship regardless of their tuition fee status.

Secondly, if we want to encourage students to achieve good marks, the scholarship should be provided only for the best and its monetary equivalent should be much higher. For example, a scholarship may cover tuition fees, rental costs or the cost of a year or semester’s exchange programme.

The purpose of reforms should remain the same – to ensure that the system of privileges and benefits is more efficient.

Ukraine is not a rich country and it is high time that we made our social support system smarter or we will end up with the government freezing all payments.

* Yegor Stadny is a higher education policy analyst at the Centre for Society Research, a think-tank in Kyiv. He received an MA in history at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and an MA in East European Studies at Warsaw University. He is currently doing his PhD at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.