In Ukraine, where state officials lose billions of hryvnias a year to the state budget by holding uncompetitive tenders and not closing offshore tax havens, the government is allegedly trying to scrimp on students' stipends. Some educators say they are being told to save money by artificially failing students, thus making some of them ineligible for stipends.
Sources in the faculty of several universities around Ukraine told the Kyiv Post that they are forced to keep their students’ performance at a level below which they qualify for government stipends.
The universities where such practice allegedly exists range from small colleges to some of the top schools in the country, like Kyiv Shevchenko National University.
The Education Ministry did not respond to Kyiv Post emailed inquiries and the Kyiv Shevchenko University denied such allegations.
The modest stipends – currently ranging from Hr 550 to Hr 730 ($90) – are normally paid to those students on government scholarship who show good or excellent academic performance.
Currently in Ukraine, about half of university students get government stipends, according to a poll jointly conducted by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation and the Ukrainian Sociology Service in March. The nation has an estimated 400,000 university or college students, so a lot of people are affected by this change in policy.
Earlier this summer the government cut stipends by almost Hr 200 by not adjusting it for inflation, which escalated into a small student protest in front of
the cabinet building in Kyiv on Aug. 1.
This forced the government
to increase the payments.
However,
the country’s budget gap is widening as Dragon Capital
investment bank, in its Nov. 1 forecast, predicts no gross domestic
product growth this year in Ukraine.
Education sources talked
to the Kyiv Post on the condition of anonymity, because they feared
retaliation by supervisors if they spoke openly. Some of them said
that the practice of downgrading students’ marks in order to cut
government stipends has been around for up to two years now.
Some say such a practice
was also used by some previous governments.
“Such practice was used
not only during this Cabinet but also in previous governments,
whenever there was lack of funding for education,” said one former
Education Ministry official on condition of anonymity for fear of
being ostracized.
Several sources in faculty
of Ukrainian universities said that their superiors told them to make
sure there are not too many students getting stipends, at times
indicating a certain threshold of those getting the stipends so that
professors do not get above it. These people refused to be quoted by
name for fear of losing their jobs.
At the same time students
who pay their tuition are not in this risk group for downgrading as
they are not eligible for government stipends regardless of their
academic performance.
To enforce the rules,
professors say are threatened with a cut of their salaries or some
benefits. They are allegedly told that if too many students will have
to get stipends that the government can’t afford, the amounts might
be taken from their salaries.
The trick here is that up
to half of salary payments for university professors in Ukraine comes
in the form of bonuses for various academic achievements, which are
legally easy to cut. Also some said that other levers, like extending
their job contracts, could be used to enforce compliance.
Inna Sovsun, director of
the Center for Society Research, a Kyiv-based nongovernmental
organization that monitors educational transformation in the country,
says faculty members who generally make small salaries are
particularly vulnerable for cuts.
The former education
ministry official said: “In such circumstances professors usually
accept such rules of the game. After all, what can one do if there
simply isn’t enough money in the budget for all students?”
Analysts say the
backhanded practice is particularly unethical, considering that some
at the Education Ministry have a reputation for enriching themselves
through uncompetitive state tenders through the purchase of
overpriced goods and services.
“It is hard to talk
about any ethics when students get their stipends cut, while the
Education Ministry orders and overpays for publication of some
textbooks,” said Sovsun from the Center for Society Research.
Sovsun says that she knows
of several university checks by government financial watchdogs that
expressed their dissatisfaction that too many students on
governmental scholarship get good and excellent grades, which makes
them entitled for stipends. She also recognizes the stipend fund does
not have sufficient amount of money for stipends for all the students
on government scholarship.
Volodymyr Kovtunets, an
analyst at the Ukrainian standardized external testing initiative
alliance, believes that the problem might be at least partially
originating locally, because doing it on the national level is too
risky.
“University rectors
might try to do this (cut expenses on student stipends) to save money
in order to qualify for a bonus at the end of the year. It’s a
standard practice,” Kovtunets said.
One official at Kyiv
Shevchenko National University told the Kyiv Post that they also
sometimes have to resort to giving students lower marks in order to
pay fewer stipends.
“We are trying to fight
with both too good and too bad grades,” said the official.
The administration of the
university told the Kyiv Post that the school is not part of such
practices and said they heard nothing about it. They also said that
some 90 percent of their students who are on government scholarship
currently get stipends, a figure that they say has not changed much
over the last several semesters.
“This
practice does not exist. The administration calls on the faculty to
assess students’ knowledge objectively and avoid any inflated or
understated grades,” said Volodymyr Buhrov, vice rector of Kyiv
Shevchenko National University. He also said the university never
received any of such instructions from the Education Ministry to
downgrade students in order to save public money.
Several
professors at Shevchenko university also denied they are part of such
practice and said they had never heard of it.
Sovsun said that the
Finance Ministry, in charge of monitoring budget income and expenses,
tells the Education Ministry to cut some of their expenses due to a
general shortfall. Then the Education Ministry allegedly sends out
its informal recommendations to universities that, in turn, pass them
on to their faculty members.
“The easiest path of
cutting expenses for the Education Ministry is to cut stipends for
students,” Sovsun said. “It is legally harder not pay salaries to
[state] university employees.”
Kyiv Post staff
writer Svitlana Tuchynska contributed to this story. She can be
reached at [email protected].
Yuriy Onyshkiv can be
reached at [email protected]
and Daria Zadorozhnaya can be reached at
[email protected].
