College students to pay for missed lectures

Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers has adopted several resolutions, including one establishing a list of paid services in the sphere of post-secondary education. This list features services that have long required payments (e.g., lamination, Xerox copies, or getting a second college diploma [without attending a single lecture]), as well as new ones, like fines for missed lectures or the usage of libraries off hours. The newspaper Delo quotes students as saying, off the record, that such services have long been provided in return for a fee at certain institutions of higher learning. University administrations insist that the government has made the right decision. “Lecturers should receive overtime,” says Volodymyr Kravets, rector of Ternopil Pedagogic University.

Most students take a dim view of this bureaucratic innovation, although some say that they have long grown accustomed to such charges: “We each pay 24 hryvnias for a missed lecture, unless we can provide a valid reason,” says a female student at the National University of Medicine. The list also includes independent external testing. “Naturally, this doesn’t apply to all such tests. The main three subjects will be tested free of charge, but if the applicant wants more tests, or if s/he wants to add to their scores from last year, then a payment will be in order,” explains Iryna Zaitseva, Deputy Minister of Science and Education of Ukraine. Students and cadets will also have to pay for their uniforms where applicable. More often than not, however, they have been paying for it already. “Only parentless students receive this uniform free of charge, all the others pay a thousand hryvnias per set,” says Maksym Lutsky, first deputy rector of the National Aviation University.

Plans harbored by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine envisage the reinstatement of entrance exams, along with the [independent external] testing procedures, as well as stripping students of scholarship in cases of poor progress — with a C- in their record-books. Prime Minister Mykola Azarov previously declared that it was necessary to check on Ukrainians’ academic progress after graduating from highschools: “We must verify the kind of knowledge these graduates have received. Such inspections must be carried out in regard to both senior students and graduates, three, five and more years after graduation.”