The meeting of the First Deputy Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine Inna Sovsun with the rectors of higher education institutions of Lviv region took place at the Lviv Polytechnic National University.
The rector of the Lviv Polytechnic National University, the chairman of the lviv Rectors' Council, professor Yuri Bobalo began an interesting and substantive discussion on the reforms in higher education. This topic is very urgent on the eve of this year's admission campaign.
Addressing to the heads of HEI of the region, the First Deputy Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine Inna Sovsun has touched a number of very important and topical issues of the development of the educational institutions, including changes in the list of specialties, adopted recently by the initiative of heads of the HEI, the further steps in reforming the financial security of the universities, the improving of the issues of a public procurement for professionals, and in general - the government costs on the domestic education sector. According to Inna Sovsun, they are much higher in a percentage than they are in the EU countries. Therefore there is an urgent task to find and use the extra budgetary resources.
Unfortunately, in Ukraine the state order in HEI is still distributed today in so-called "manual regime". This in its turn leads to the obvious corruption risks. There is also such a disturbing tendency: every year the number of students decreases faster than the state order.
The guest gave a lot of comparative characteristics relating to development of the education sector here and abroad. For example, in Ukraine more than 80 percent of school graduates enter the universities and other higher education institutions. Meanwhile, in Western Europe and the United States the percentage of people with higher education is less than one third of the total population. Public costs per student in Ukraine are now almost 3000 Dollars. While in Poland this figure is one and a half times higher, in the US - three times higher, and in France - almost four times higher.
A significant issue that caused a particular interest in the participants was the reforms in financial sector of higher education. The Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine proposes to divide the funds, that are given to education, in four segments: base (block) funding, the social fund, the development fund and the state target support fund. 80 percent of the funds will be provided on the basis of funding in the previous year, and the allocation of the remaining 20 percent will be affected by the indicators such as the total number of students in EI, their employment, quality of scientific-research work, international cooperation, attraction of funds from the non-government scientific grants. For the latter of these components, we should use the practices of many developed countries, where each is involved, in this way the university receives dollars from the state treasury, said Inna Sovsun.
Today the present status of the national universities as the state budget institutions impose on them a lot of restrictions towards the independence of their activities. Therefore, we have to create a new legal status of the HEI, which would ensure the establishment of competitive wages for the teachers, their amount and loading standards, in general - the real financial autonomy, stressed the First Deputy Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine.
At the end of the meeting Inna Savsun answered questions from the audience, including the ones from the rector of the M V Lysenko Lviv National Music Academy, Igor Pylatjuk, the rector of the Lviv National Agrarian University, Volodimyr Snitynskyi, the rector of the Lviv Institute of Economy and Tourism, Igor Bochana, the Head of Lviv Regional Union of Education and Science of Ukraine Maria Yatseyko.