You're reading: Hrynevych says Ukraine to start work on new law on higher education in 2020

Ukraine’s Minister of Education and Science Lilia Hrynevych has said that the law on higher education is getting obsolete, and they will start work on its new version in 2020.

“In 2018, we will publish a forecast for the development of Ukraine’s education in terms of vocational education, higher education and adult education. In 2019 we plan to work out a strategy for the development of higher education until 2025. And in 2020 we work on a draft of a new version of the law of Ukraine on higher education,” she said at a meeting of the Education Ministry’s board in Kyiv on Jan.26.

Hrynevych explained that, unlike the legislation of the United States and other old democracies, the regulatory legal acts in Ukraine are too detailed. “That is the reason why the law on higher education of 2014 is becoming obsolete,” she added.

At the same time, the minister noted that not all universities were ready to shift from direct state control to the practice of independent expert evaluation of their activities, as stipulated by the law on higher education.

“Today, when the Ministry of Education abolished a number of its orders for de-bureaucratization of higher education, what have many universities done with the decisions of their academic councils? They bureaucratize the process at their university, demanding from teachers to fill in a sheaf of papers that have no longer been needed at European and other leading universities of the world,” she said.

Meanwhile, Hrynevych added that three years of the implementation of the higher education law showed that the financial autonomy of universities remains a “hostage” of budget legislation.