The quality of education in Ukraine is getting worse year by year, and over 50,000 Ukrainian students leave the country to go to Poland. The situation is tragic since we are losing our most valuable asset: young people.

More than 70 percent of Ukrainians consider the quality of higher education in Ukraine to be medium, low or very low. In 2019, almost 50 percent of the officially registered unemployed in Ukraine were with high education. For comparison, the share of unemployed among those who received vocational education is 30%. Almost 40 per cent of Ukrainian students believe that educational programmes do not meet the needs of the labour market. Given the crucial role education plays in shaping future generations, such numbers are a cry for reform.

Although higher education in Ukraine is by and large very accessible, it doesn’t yield the returns on government funds fueled into it. In Ukraine, 51% of young people do not work by profession. Education is a right, but the way the right to get education in Ukraine is provided should be transformed. In particular, we need to change the way incentives work. We need to empower students to decide how the funding for their education is distributed as opposed to having the state as the sole – and rather ineffective – manager.

In total, in 2020, expenditures for financing higher educational establishments amounted to Hr 41.3 billion — nearly $1.5 billion. Out of the total, Hr 39.9 billion came from the state budget and another Hr 1.4 billion from local budgets. More than 50 percent of those funds were allocated through the system of public procurement of the training of professionals in higher education institutions. However, state universities are generously funded, they don’t pay taxes which entices corruption and creates losses to the state budget.

The funding mainly depends on the budget of previous years. In 2020, the minimum and maximum change in the budget of each higher educational institution was 95% and 120% from 2019, respectively. An insignificant part of the funding depends on the scale of the university, target students, regional coefficient, positions in international rankings, the number of funds for research that the university attracts from business or international grants, employment of graduates.

Higher education can either be financed directly through the state budget or students themselves. As the numbers show, the first option doesn’t work well in Ukraine. Therefore, we at the Office of Simple Solutions and Results propose to opt for a grant system that would make students responsible for deciding where the money goes. Our reform will kill two birds with one stone: increase competition among students and ensure tailored management of the funds dedicated every year to education in Ukraine through competition among universities.

Thanks to the grant system, students will be able to decide which educational establishment to pay for, and that will also include a possibility to study abroad.

Based on the external evaluation exams and social needs, the money will basically follow students. To enable the reform, the government will fix the maximum price of education in public universities and put together a list of students according to External Independent Test (EIT) results.

Grants will be awarded for studies at private universities or universities abroad and only for full-time education.

It is important to stress that Ukrainian private universities such as the Ukrainian Catholic University and the Kyiv School of Economics are highly competitive and provide great education mainly because their funding system isn’t rooted in favouritism, unlike that of public universities. Also, rectors need to be seen as managers to ensure the effective development of educational institutions.

Since students will be the sole managers of the funding, the amount of funding received by higher education institutions will directly depend on the number of enrolled students. Moreover, it will be possible to diversify the size of grants so that students can get 100 percent, 70 percent, 50 percent, or 30 per cent of the price covered while at the moment, it’s either the full amount or nothing.

Our policies will significantly decrease the existing inefficiency in Ukraine’s education system and make universities compete for students. After the reform, in order to survive, Ukrainian universities will need to focus on providing the best services so that students choose them.

The essence of this education reform is very radical and revolutionary.

The student himself will choose an educational institution and single it out of the rest by deciding to pay for it with the money given to them by the government. Such an approach will prevent corruption in the higher education system, and the introduced competition will improve the quality and efficiency of education as such thereby driving Ukraine faster towards economic prosperity. Funding will not depend on previous budgets that have been lobbied for by state universities. However, the government will still have a role to play. It will be able to increase funding for priority areas of education, determine the number of social grants etc. This will allow the government to prioritize careers which it deems are important at specific stages of the country’s development.

Last month, the Office of Simple Solutions and Results established cooperation with the Verkhovna Rada committee on education, science and innovation. We agreed to create an interdepartmental working group, within which we are working together with the Ministry of Education, the committee and other stakeholders on the needed legislative amendments.

Both the Ministry of Education and the committee support our ideas. I am delighted to see that there is political will for such a timely new approach to education policy.

Mikheil Saakashvili has been the chair of the executive committee of the National Reforms Council since May 7, 2020. He served as governor of Odesa Oblast from May 30, 2015, to Nov. 9, 2016. He was president of Georgia from Jan. 25, 2004, to Nov. 17, 2013.