You're reading: Autonomy, market forces key to ‘revolutionary’ law

When the nation’s 803 higher learning centers open their doors next month to more than 2 million students, they will have newly delegated powers to pass on knowledge how they want and by whom, according to a landmark bill that was passed on July 1.

Described by Education Minister Serhiy Kvit as a “revolutionary law,” a great majority of its provisions will enter into force on Sept. 6.

The changes are designed to give universities more academic, financial and organizational autonomy. By forcing the once almighty Education Ministry to relinquish its Soviet-era micro-management role, the law seeks to improve the quality of higher education and bridge the gulf between theory and practice on the labor market.

While the ministry will still oversee education, such as setting accreditation standards that are now voluntary, granting new licenses and conducting mandatory undergraduate admission exams, overall monitoring and program accreditation will be administered by a newly created National Agency for Quality Assurance.

It will be composed of higher education professionals, employers and students. Its expert committees, which will essentially accredit educational programs, will be composed of 9-15 specialists from a corresponding field of study.

“The law introduces changes…to the form and substance of university degrees, to the way quality is assured, and to the manner in which universities are managed,” Kyiv Mohyla Academy associate professor Mychailo Wynnyckyj told the Kyiv Post.

In addition to NAQA externally monitoring educational performance, universities will now have to conduct and publish internal monitoring results. A clearer picture, as a result, will emerge of the best rated higher learning centers.

“With autonomy, comes more rights and responsibilities,” said Wynnyckyj, adding that not many institutions have the required skills for autonomous management.

This will include more freedom to manage finances, including the creation of endowment funds. Universities will have to decide whom to hire – they can now recognize foreign academic credentials, not the Education Ministry – how much to pay lecturers, and new freedoms to design and implement unique academic programs, according to the Cambridge-educated sociologist. Students and faculty can even embark on joint entrepreneurial ventures under the auspices of a university to operate innovative firms, business incubators, or publishing houses, for example.

Shevchenko University vice rector Volodymyr Buhrov welcomed the newly granted financial freedoms, since now universities can open accounts with state banks instead of having to rely on the state treasury for installments, which includes the ability to earn interest, receive dividends and royalties on patents.

“We are in our third year of building a stadium not because we don’t have enough money but because the (state) treasury doesn’t give us enough money, or when it does, it does so in winter when we can’t build,” said Buhrov.

Uncontrollable executive autonomy should vanish, since university officials from deans up to university rectors will be limited to two, five-year terms to be elected by faculty (weighted at 75 percent), students (15 percent) and non-faculty members (10 percent). Multiple positions are also abolished under the law, which was deemed by experts as a huge conflict of interest.

“This is a positive step, this will bring fresh management into universities…to have rotation, to have successors, but to have innovation as well,” stated Buhrov of Shevchenko University.

On Jan. 1, 2016, market forces will start dictating which universities will receive government funding for scholarship students based on nationwide admissions exams. Called “money follows the student,” the more qualified students choose a certain university, the more money that institution gets from the government. Currently, the Education Ministry pre-determines the number of free places at each learning center, including majors that are not in demand.

“The law will evolutionarily renew the educational system which will be not the ballast, but the driver of economic growth and social development,” said Bionic Hill innovation park president Viktor Halasiuk on Aug. 6, cited by Interfax-Ukraine

Thus, educational institutions will have to live and die by their reputation on the market. This will foster competition and eventually lead to university closures in fields where there are too many, ones that have reputations for selling diplomas, or others that are poorly managed, according to education policy expert Yegor Stadnyi of the Center for Society Research, a non-profit, non-partisan think tank in Kyiv.

Cutthroat competition, according to him, will force universities to work more with employers and professional associations to match their future demand with five-year graduation cycles, for example, and to form partnerships with firms.

“With the lapse of time, universities will become ‘educational-scientific’ corporations, which have the possibility of cooperating legally with business. Employers, in turn, will become not passive actors with a non-speaking part, but real clients of the educational system who influence the standards and qualities of education, said Halasiuk of Bionic Hill.

Another outcome as market means become determining factors, is reduced corruption and plagiarism. Universities must in addition publish their budgets, projects, publications, including dissertations, staff salaries and name management.

“Who teaches the best will get the best students,” noted Volodymyr Kovtunets, programs coordinator for the U.S.-funded Ukrainian Standardized External Testing Initiative Legacy Alliance. He added that regional agrarian and pedagogy institutions will start disappearing.

Academic plagiarism for a Ph.D. or Doctor of Sciences will be punishable by having the degree annulled, the student’s supervisor relieved of their duties for two years, “as are official examiners, while the institution that hosts the relevant thesis examination committee has its PhD-granting right (accreditation) revoked for one year,” added Wynnyckyj.

Educators will have greater flexibility in the classroom, since their workload is reduced from 900 to 600 hours per academic year, which will promote independent work and study outside the lecture hall, stated Kvit on at the Ukraine Crisis Media Center Aug. 4.

Coming into effect on Sept. 1, 2015, this should also reduce bribery, since students will spend 20-30 percent less time in the classroom and won’t have to pay off their professors for skipping lectures, according to Stadnyi.

Enshrined in legislation is the “Bologna Process,” a three-cycle system of education whereby a student earns a Bachelor’s, Master’s and a Ph.D. In a compromise, Ukraine kept the Doctor of Science degree, primarily a research degree, in addition to preserving a “short cycle” junior Bachelor’s degree at the bottom end.

Kyiv Post editor Mark Rachkevych can be reached at [email protected].