The week before last, Ukraine’s Ministry of the Economy proposed certain amendments to the draft national doctrine on education in the twenty-first century. Among the top priorities of official policy in education development is to establish a market of educational services. In Soviet days, due to the absence of market relations, educational institutions pursued no economic activities; there was only the question of funding for this sector. Yury Vitrenko, chief of the human development department at the Ministry of the Economy, told The Day, “The economic activity of educational institutions is a far broader notion than financing the sector. Today, the state already has a certain market in educational services, with the functional mechanism of this market still to be studies and improved.” The educational institutions of today are the producers and vendors of educational services, while students and their parents are customers. The former and latter create the supply and demand for educational services. The role of market regulator for educational services is played by the price, which forces all the players on this market to search for the most rational, including economically rational, parameters of educational institutions’ performance. With this in view, it seems worthwhile to revise the structure of education funding: the main method should be to fund educational institutions according to a value-per-student index, rather than one based on estimated budget funds. Under this approach, even governmental funding of educational services would begin to follow market laws, for in such case the educational institution more attractive and, accordingly, enrolling more students would receive more state money. We are also now raising the question of educational institutions’ economic activity because there is a perpetually growing market for paid educational services (additional subjects on kindergartens and schools curricula, paid education in institutions of higher learning), as well as such forms of budget revenues for institutions of higher education as leasing a section of school premises, gainfully employing an institution’s own transport vehicles on weekends, etc.
The ministry also suggests that the methods of educational funding include the issue of student scholarships, for the Constitution guarantees all citizens free education at day-care establishments, high schools, and in institutions of higher education on a competitive basis. In addition, the Ministry of the Economy does not agree that vocational education should be reoriented toward filling the orders of specific economic entities and be funded only at their expense, for this system of education cannot survive without mandatory state support. To increase budget expenditures for this segment of education, the doctrine proposes that responsibility for financing the complete secondary education of vocational school students be borne by local authorities.
According to the ministry, education and research funding should not be linked to a percent of gross domestic product. It is proposed to a phase in period for developing the doctrine into three stages and to gradually bridge the gap between the country’s government expenditures for education and the average indicators in the European Union — first by 50%, then by 75%, and finally by 100%.
Mr. Vitrenko also told The Day that the knowledge gained by the graduates of Ukrainian educational institutions has unfortunately not yet become a competitive commodity on the European labor market, and this means that Ukraine’s system of education should be aimed at achieving the educational potential of its population comparable in both quantitative and qualitative term with that of the world’s industrially developed states.
