The last time Ukraine faced foreign occupation and cross-border artillery bombing was during World War II. That was until this spring, when Russia annexed Crimea and then started a military invasion of eastern Ukraine. This has changed the lives of thousands of high school graduates who want to enter university.
In this year’s admissions campaign the government has lost all possibility of conducting external independent testing (EIT) in Crimea and in major parts of the Donbas region.
While Crimeans who wished to study on the mainland had the opportunity to pass the EIT in the nearest region to them, approximately 40 percent of applicants from Donbas had no such chance due to threats from Kremlin-backed fighters.
Since entrance rankings define who will study free of charge and are mainly based on EIT results, those who didn’t have the opportunity take it were given permission to apply through entrance exams.
That was not an easy decision for the government since the EIT was designed to replace corruption in the entrance exam system. Unfortunately, war will only increase the risk of bribes made during 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 on time so there is an urgent need to create an alternative plan 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 their EIT results. Nearly 600 Crimeans will use this opportunity, which is 4 percent of all Crimean high school graduates.
Moreover, during the spring semester almost 1,700 Crimean students transferred to a different learning center, mostly in favor of institutions in Kyiv, Lviv and Odesa.
Thus, parliament’s admissions privileges were definitely a political move to support the occupied peninsula’s citizens. 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 re-doubled force. Certain groups continue to have privileged admission terms to universities.
According to legislation, the list of such groups is quite long. Each successive Ukrainian government has added to it to win votes or to temporarily quell social conflicts.
In addition to orphans and people living with disabilities, the privileged list also contains miners’ children or people who somehow suffered from the Chornobyl nuclear catastrophe.
Unfortunately, there has been no research on the effectiveness of such policies.
On the one hand, most people with disabilities cannot exercise their right due to lacking accommodations for them, including ramps, training materials, specially trained teachers and social workers. Still, people often draft fake documents to gain privileged entrance rights.
It is clear that this system fails at providing access to higher education for under-represented groups. Recent higher education reforms decreased the total number of subsidized places for such groups by up to 5 percent.
Yet it is a big task to 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 allocated $460 million for them, or 29 percent of the cost of all subsidized places. There are two types of scholarships: academic 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 qualify.
The scholarship is $60 a month, which is definitely not enough to live in any Ukrainian city where a university is located. 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 grades, 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 program.
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 Stadnyi is a higher education policy analyst at the Centre for Society Research, a think-tank in Kyiv. He is currently doing his PhD at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.
