Students will be exempt from donations

This draft law was registered at the Verkhovna Rada on October 24. In this project, Vice Speaker Mykola Tomenko wants to prohibit funding of higher educational institutions with charitable donations, presents, or financial aid from their students. Tomenko says that he proposed this legislative initiative because today many universities collect obligatory payments from the students under the guise of donations. Students are forced to pay, because they are threatened with expulsion or disciplinary penalties. Besides, students do not have an opportunity to track the usage of their money, they do not receive any services in return, and universities carry no responsibility for it. Those students that refuse to pay often suffer pressure from the university staff: unfair assessment of their knowledge, eviction from dormitories, disciplinary punishments, etc. According to the vice prime minister, this practice is now widely spread and present in this or another form in all Ukrainian higher educational institutions. Tomenko hopes that this draft law will be supported.

COMMENTARY

Ihor LYKARCHUK, head of the Ukrainian Center for Education Quality Assessment:

“I absolutely support this initiative. If a student enrolls as subsidized by the state budget, what kind of donations can be wanted from them? And what do these ‘donations’ mean? First of all, they have to be voluntary, and if they turn into something obligatory, it is a sort of disguised tutorial fees. Besides, the mechanisms of contributions of such payments have never been transparent, and never will. If it is a donation, a student has the right to know what this money is used for. But there is no such mechanism, and the donation dissolves in the general amount of funding.

“I understand university presidents who need to survive in the extreme conditions of a total lack of money. But it is immoral to use students for that. The author of the draft law did a right thing: this has to be done away with, once and for all.

“In my opinion, this law should also apply to schools and professional and technical educational establishments. However, our people are extremely resourceful, and they will find some other way to pump money from students as soon as the law is passed. Today’s disproportion in education financing should be eliminated in the first place, the whole system of education has to be changed. Various donations and charity funds appear in educational institutions because there is no effective financial policy in this sphere. The assigned budget money is spent on universities maintenance instead of students’ education fees. Many other countries have long ago moved to the student-oriented financing system. No matter how much money we have in the budget, it will never be enough with the education financing system we have now.”