Mykhaylo Zhurovs’kyy: Reforms to Higher Education—Necessary for Social Change

Wednesday, 25 January 2012

Higher education creates the human capital of a nation.  It is responsible for the nation’s social development, which in turn realizes the potential of this capital.  The potential of a nation depends on the level of education and professional competency of its people.

For this reason a country’s desired path of development should closely correlate to the goals and task it assigns to its establishments of higher education.  Based on this premises, a law on Higher Education should be developed which allows change related to society’s evolvement for a given period of time.

I do not wish to offend the authors of the other two bills, dubbed the Miroshnichenko and the Yatsenyuk-Orobets bills, but I will not comment on them.  This article will address the third proposal referred to as the Ministry’s bill.

This bill begs the questions: what social changes does this bill hope to create?  Does it have mechanisms that allow for explosive development and, for Ukraine to emerge among the top 12 countries, in terms of developing human capital, as instructed by the President of Ukraine?  Does this legislation address working conditions and the quality of scientific establishments, by providing them with the latest equipment, information, and the opportunity to conduct scientific research that would enable them to make the desired breakthroughs?  Does this bill encourage the innovative, high-tech development of the country through the organic interaction of national education, science, business and government?  Does it regulate the relationship between HEIs and the labor market?  The answers to these questions are no, this bill doesn’t come close to addressing these issues.

As I work in the sphere of technical education, I would like to draw your attention to this bill’s weaknesses in this area.  This bill doesn’t consider that technical education enables the accelerated development of education in advanced countries of the world.  First of all, in contrast to the existing legislation, the Ministry’s bill excludes technical universities.  This legislation confirms the unpopularity of higher technical education in Ukraine anticipates its deterioration and accelerates the processes of “discarding” the most talented young people to immigrate to developed countries of the world.

Ukraine hasn’t yet completely lost out on the chance to prevail on the world market of auto manufacturing, materials science, metallurgy, chemistry, information technology, plus there is still a chance for developing nanotechnology, biotechnology, etc.

Higher technical education includes many unique issues and needs the government’s serious attention; this should be reflected in the legislation.  A modern day requirement is to line up multiple sources of funding for technical universities, as they integrate education, science and business innovation.

Higher technical education is financially demanding as research and experiments require equipment that must be developed and maintained.  It requires complicated scheduling to allow students to gain broad experience in their field, while taking into account what will serve to advance the development of the country, the needs of the labor market, etc.  This is lacking from the bill and its absence weakens higher technical education.

Work on developing this bill was started by the previous Ministry of Education and Science, 3-3.5 years ago.  Their main goal, at that time was to define external independent testing.  Because this one issue didn’t warrant changing the entire On Higher Education law, they started attaching various other articles.

This practice, of randomly stringing along various items to the bill, was continued by the officials of the new Ministry.  Their particular emphasis however, was to include provisions that give minor regulatory and licensing functions of the MoESYS.

As a result, the legislation starts to contradict its initial goal of facilitating the social development of the country.  It is also longer than the previous law: 71 articles spanning 87 pages instead of the 69 articles on 54 pages of the previous bill.  Structurally, three groups of articles can be identified in the Ministry’s bill.

The first group of articles relates to practical matters and should be ratified.  They bring Ukrainian higher education in line with European standards (baccalaureate, masters, Ph.D.) while keeping the junior specialist, and Doctor of Science degrees.  They increase the time it takes to obtain a master’s degree from 1-1.5 years to 1.5-2 years, and also the time required to obtain a doctor of philosophy from 3 to 4 years (Art. 6).  Article 13 makes Ukrainian higher education consistent with the European National Qualifications Framework.  Article 23 clarifies the definitions and status of national and research universities.  Several other articles address similarly practical issues, for a total of about 20 articles.

The second group of articles contradicts the general desire of the law to broaden the scope of HEI autonomy by instituting excessive centralization in higher education.  Over 80% of the articles contained in this bill have an, albeit minor, regulatory character.  In nearly 50 articles the Cabinet of Ministers and the MoESYS are assigned coordinating and regulatory discretion over universities, specifically articles 6, 9, 12, 13, 25, 28, 34, 41, 42, 46, 50, 51, 54, 56, 57, 62, 66, 67 and others.  Ratifying these articles will not only decrease academic independence and creativity, they will also burden the Ministry with petty administrative responsibilities and make it nearly impossible for them to develop and implement a progressive educational policy.

The articles which are supposed to increase the financial autonomy of universities (Art. 23 on “introducing funding norms for education and scientific research at national and research HEIs;” Art. 65 on “the right to independently manage revenues, including those obtained by providing fee based services; and opening spending and savings accounts” and several others), unfortunately aren’t backed by financial or economic mechanisms and are not included in the state Budget.  They may end up sharing the fate of the current law’s Art. 57.  This article detailed salary increases but hasn’t functioned for over 15 years.  The article was repealed for the reasons cited above that threaten the functioning of the proposed legislations

In my opinion, the third group of articles threatens the quality of higher education and research.  Among them, the most unacceptable is Art. 17 which gives the MoESYS the responsibility of issuing diplomas.  Because Ukrainian society does not yet have an acceptable sense of responsibility, scientific work and research should be evaluated and certified independently, not by those subordinate and accountable to the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine.  The numerous articles in the Ministry's bill, which deal with the conditions of education, have been extensively commented on by the media and are also unacceptable.

There are also articles that are governed by various subordinate clauses, and which don’t “measure up” to the level of the law.  Specifically these include Art. 28 On Structural Subdivisions of HEIs (5 pages of text), Art. 42 On Expulsion, Academic Leave, Reinstatement and Transfers, Art. 43 On the Structure of the Educational Process, Art. 51 On Lecturers’ Work Hours, Art. 67 On Paid Services and others.  There are nearly 10 such articles and they should be thrown out.

Considering the above mentioned arguments, two approaches are possible.

1. Accept changes to the current Law On Higher Education (not a new bill), which is grounded on the first group of articles mentioned above while simultaneously preparing a new law on Higher Education in Ukraine,  that would address the most important issues related to the country’s development.

2. Ratifying this bill but removing most of the articles mentioned above in the second and third groups.  This approach would require that everyone understand that the bill is temporary and transitory, and that it will be replaced after the reforms to higher education, that are demanded by society, are implemented.

Mykhaylo Zhurovs’kyy

Published on the National Technical University of Ukraine KPI web-site (http://kpi.ua)