It is hard to find anyone who is happy with the current state of education here in Ukraine. Polls show that 43 percent of Ukrainians consider the education system as “extremely corrupt.” Petty bribes are routinely demanded for tasks as simple as enrolling a child in public school. The system is watched over by a man whose main contribution to government seems to be to ensure that the title of “least popular minister” is never in question.
If there is one sphere in which Ukrainian education excels, it is in spending money. According to a recent European Commission report, public spending on education accounts for 6.2 percent of gross domestic product, which is more than Germany, Canada, Finland, or the Netherlands, to name only a few. So where is the money going?
Research published at Forbes.ua and Kyiv Post last year showed that the educational system is designed to serve a population that no longer exists. A 40 percent decline in school-aged children since independence has not been accompanied by a reduction in the number of schools, teachers, or administrative staff.
The result is a system with 6,800 unnecessary schools, 200,000 extra teachers and untold numbers of redundant support staff. What exactly all these teachers are doing is also something of a mystery, as a 2011 World Bank working paper found an average nationwide class size of 18.1. Finally, if staff were cut, the remaining teacher’s salaries “could rise by 80 percent” without any increase in funding.
Higher education is in a similar situation: Ukraine has literally hundreds more licensed institutions of higher education than similarly sized countries like France, which corresponds to twice as many places as applicants. Every separate institution means more support staff, more administrators, and most importantly, more people with a vested interest in keeping the status quo.
If official policy briefs are any indication, such people can rest easy. After a fascinating aside on the state of plagiarism in German law schools and the corruption-fighting priorities of American educators, only the slightest mention is made of any form of corruption outside of student-teacher bribery, and even that topic is addressed in a manner that suggests that such issues are the result of personal moral weakness, not economic circumstance.
However, in reality, professors are caught between the demands of two incompatible systems. A study by American and British researchers described academic staff under pressure to produce European amounts of research while handling a Soviet course load – and all while holding down a second job in order to pay the bills, as eighty percent of teaching faculty needs to seek secondary employment just to make ends meet.
Administrators interviewed concurred that academic salaries are below living wages, but disagreed that this was a problem: “the majority of administrators argued that second jobs contributed to academic development by exposing faculty to the ‘real world’ outside the walls of the university.”
Authorities with any desire to limit corruption do not knowingly overwork and underpay their subordinates. And this is the very issue. Corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for private gain, and student-teacher bribery certainly fits that description. But so does holding public office and steadfastly refusing to change the conditions that not only permit, but actively foster, corrupt practices in schools and universities.
So what do education officials have to gain from the status quo? Spending that amounts to more than $10 billion. We are currently in the dark about the relationship between this public spending and the personal finances of top education ministers. As of the time of this writing, Transparency International- Ukraine has yet to receive their public asset declarations. The public, of course, has a right to know where all this money is going, and we intend to find out.
Alla Voloshyna is a senior analyst for Transparency International Ukraine.
