ACADEMIC GARDEN BED

Castes

As my colleague Artem already mentioned in his text – at our university, in particular at our faculty, there are a lot of people who despise higher education, teachers, their peers, science, the speciality being studied in general. There are also passive learners and a certain share of really conscious people, who chose their programs not based on the principle “my mother forced me to go to university", "lawyers are needed everywhere", but because they are really interested in gaining knowledge and achieving a certain life goal. Because if this goal is not there, then there can be no conscious choice of speciality; there cannot be both proper training and the subsequent desire to change the education system.

When all these vegetables and fruits are planted together under the name "academic group", problems do not occur immediately. In the beginning, everyone tries in good faith to learn, help each other, start their own educational journey, and "give a chance" to the university. Shortly after, groups are formed, and then they turn into “clans”. Everyone has their own goal and various means of achieving it. Someone considers writing off the norm, someone approaches it practically, and someone would rather do nothing at all. But there is still no disaster: "nerds” are anticipating the exam session, and the “losts” and “neutrals” form their evil plans of how to get an education without much direct effort. 

The disaster begins when the weakest link in the team is not kicked out after the exam session. By some miracle, a conventional "Stanislav" got a non-deserved 60/100, and he is free to continue his "academic odyssey". Then everyone understands: "Yes, it is possible to find ways around this system...". Now, these three groups are even more polarized and gnash their teeth at each other. Someone is angry that "Katya" is making presentations for the 5th time in a week, and someone is annoyed by the behavior of "Lyuba", who takes advantage of the teacher's bad sense of humor and "earns points for herself".

The head of the group faces the most difficult task. They have to occasionally decide something, communicate with teachers, reschedule classes or cancel them altogether. It is impossible to cover the needs of all three castes. Two – yes, but all of them – never. The neutral caste is always pleased, because they just go with the flow, despite whether it is the flow of a beautiful heavenly stream or the flow of a sewer pipe. But it is very difficult to find a consensus between nerds and losts. Someone will always suffer.

But who is to blame for all this?

It is the fault of those who do not perform the sorting process. It is impossible to leave in one academic group people with different values, different ideals, with radically different priorities, set for the period of study. The university is not a social experiment, it is not a laboratory for crossing a radish with a peach, or a rose with an eggplant. The university was created to fulfill people's needs in education. If a person who does not need a higher education gets into such an institution, the university/faculty/department must help him remove this burden from his back, expelling such a person, and not giving him the "one hundred and twenty-fifth" chance, which he does not need. A lot of students in Ukraine enter universities due to social pressure, superstitious parents, insecurity in their life, fear of mobilization, etc. Let's help these people leave the undesired leisure that is higher education.

Why is it not implemented?

The problem is obvious - finances. Any institution needs funds, in public universities, there are few opportunities to attract capital: state-funded students who are paid for by the state, and contract students who pay for education with their own money. The faculty, of course, strives to collect as many students as possible from two categories in order to be able to spend on salaries, equipment, etc. And here scales appear, where on the one hand the option is "high-cost education and a small number of students", and on the other – "cheap education and a large number of students". In Ukraine, preference is given to the second option, which, I believe, is the biggest mistake in the current system of higher education. Because a child, or mostly parents of a child, can give 30-40 thousand hryvnias per year (which is approximately 800-1000 Euros), despite the child's interest in education. But they are less likely to pay 120-150 thousand hryvnias per year (which is approximately 3,000-4,000 Euros ≈ the average price tag for a bachelor's degree in the Baltic countries) for education, when they aren’t sure that their child likes the program and will put in effort. Education in Ukraine is now too affordable. You can dispute this: "What if I want to study, but I don't have 120-150 thousand hryvnias a year?". Everything is very simple, if you are really sure of the need for this education - you take a state loan for education. In Ukraine, there are now quite liberal conditions for this loan: the payment is divided into 15 years and is charged at only 3% annually. The second option: you go to work, and only then pay for your education. Believe me, the attitude to this education will change dramatically in a positive direction, and a large number of people unmotivated to study will be weeded out in advance. Because when you pay a lot of money for something, you will demand more, and your desire to take more from this process will increase.

The described step will contribute to two trends:

1. The total number of students in institutions of higher education will decrease;

2. Competition for students from universities will increase.

Both are great. The “state-funded" should also be reformatted from a "four-year freebie" to a system of discounts, where students with the highest performance are given certain discounts on their studies. Similar practices have already been implemented at the Kyiv School of Economics and the Ukrainian Catholic University.

What will happen if the problem is ignored?

If you do not implement changes in the field of "sorting", even taking into account the threat of not having large financial resources, your university/faculty/department will continue to produce a compote of losts, nerds, and neutrals. The first curse you because they were forced to learn something, the second because they were forced to suffer from the first, and only neutrals will be grateful because to them it does not matter, how to get an education, the most important thing is to just get it…