Inna Sovsun became Ukraine’s youngest first deputy minister in 2014. She talks to The PIE about her aspirations for the country’s higher education system, the importance of collaborating internationally, and the need to engage domestic students in the university landscape.
The PIE: When did you become first deputy minister?
IS: I first became deputy minister in March 2014, right after the Revolution of Dignity, it was very unexpected. The man who was appointed to be the minister, he knew the work I was doing, I was running a think tank and education policy analysis before that. He suddenly calls me and says, “Do you want to be first deputy minister?” and I am like, “Oh my god, I don’t have a single suit in my wardrobe, how much time do I have?” He says: “I am announcing tomorrow,” so that was all very unexpected, particularly keeping in mind that I was 29 at that time.
“If you are a young 29-30 year old male, people don’t see you as a boy, if you are a 29-30 year old girl, they see you as a girl”
The PIE: Did you ever find any prejudice from other people in government because of your age?
IS: Not so much in government I believe, within the academic community because I don’t have a PhD degree and I still haven’t finished my dissertation. Secondly because of my age, thirdly, which was never really pronounced, but I believe it was an issue, is the gender issue as well. Because if you are a young 29-30 year old male, people don’t see you as a boy, if you are a 29-30 year old girl, they see you as a girl.
So, yes there were a lot of prejudices, I believe there still are, particularly if you do the reform, if you are active in what you are doing, that attracts attention and clearly with attention comes criticism.
The PIE: So what are your main goals in your position? What do you really want to achieve in Ukraine with regards to education?
IS: Luckily for us, the first big law that was passed after the Revolution of Dignity was the Higher Education Bill. The law was already in the parliament, the support for that became possible because of the political change, but it was very well prepared before. The new law introduced a new system of higher education with more responsible and autonomous universities, with less ministerial control and that is a big goal. But clearly there are lots of problems with this. Providing higher autonomy is great, but how do you give more autonomy to the institutions who do not always behave responsibly? That is a big challenge.
Then in the system, people still believe that the Ministry is responsible for everything. We do the research, 32 focus groups in 60 Ukrainian universities, where professors and students were interviewed and whenever they are asked about the reforms, how they are proceeding, they always talk about what the Ministry is doing. That is completely wrong, particularly within this paradigm of higher education reform where actually the idea is to give more autonomy to the universities.
“We have around 300 public universities and a few dozen private universities and it is clearly too much, some just turn into diploma mills”
The bigger change that we expect is that the universities would provide a higher quality education, meaning that they will provide a more up to date education, because actually we do have a good well developed system of higher education.
Second, we have around 300 public universities and a few dozen private universities and it is clearly too much, it means that some universities just turn into diploma mills. Another component is that we need, in order to make higher education a quality education, is to connect it closely to research and that is again a big challenge.
The PIE: How important do you think it is to collaborate and work with an international focus?
IS: I have been often blamed for paying too much attention to the international aspect of it because unfortunately our internal quality assurance mechanisms are not functioning properly. Our peer review is basically non-existent; a lot of academic journals, you just pay $20 and you get a publication. So the quality of publications have been really bad and that has created a vicious circle and we just needed to break it, so as policy makers we had to rely on some other criteria that we can really trust, and that is where the international aspects come in a lot.
In Ukraine we have a system where the professor titles are awarded by the Ministry. We have changed that, so previously you would have to have some research, some publications in Ukrainian journals, plus a period of teaching and other minor requirements. From now on you have to have publications in international peer review journals, you need to prove with an international certificate that you speak English and that created an outrage within the community that this is too much, we are only relying on international indicators and so on and so forth, even though a lot of people would support that.
“For some universities, particularly for medical universities, 60% of their funding comes from international students”
The PIE: How many international students study in Ukraine?
IS: We have about 64,000 international students studying in Ukraine, a third of them doing medicine, almost all of them are from developing countries. There was a rapid increase in the number of international students because for universities, frankly speaking, they became one of the biggest sources of funding, because they pay more than Ukrainian students. For some universities, particularly for medical universities, 60% of their funding comes from international students. There was a drop in 2015 after the war erupted in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea was occupied, some people were afraid to go for a while but it is still way more than five years ago.
The PIE: Which countries do international students come from?
IS: We have students from 148 countries, in total international students make up almost 4% out of all the students in Ukraine. Asia is big, African countries are big. We have lots of students coming from Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan – 45% come from post-Soviet countries.
The problem is that we are now getting lots of complaints from the embassies in other countries that they are not recognising Ukrainian diplomas. For instance, Jordan recently declared they will only recognise diplomas from 16, 17 universities in the Ukraine. I have met someone from Iran who said we have a problem recognising Ukrainian diplomas because four Ukrainian universities have turned themselves into diploma mills.
Higher education still has a lot to offer, we still have a good medical education; we still have a very good technical education and engineering education; IT is very good. But we clearly need to set up stronger quality assurance mechanisms and that is something that we have been doing for the past two years, constantly in dialogue with universities. We are losing in the medium term perspective, if we continue to do things like this then we are going to lose the international student market and we can’t really do that.
“We are now getting lots of complaints from the embassies in other countries that they are not recognising Ukrainian diplomas”
The PIE: And where is popular for Ukrainian students go abroad?
IS: Poland is booming, but a lot of professionals are saying, “Everybody is running away to Poland”, in fact it is about 5-7,000 new student visas that are being granted to Ukrainian students studying in Polish universities. This year we have 270,000 university applicants, so it is a not a big percentage, but it is growing.
It is rising concern and again the response is very interesting because some universities are saying we should lower the entry requirements for our students. But the Ministry position is that, no, we should be more rigorous in our requirements because this is precisely the reason why the students are running away to Poland. Clearly there are other things – because it is an EU country, there are employment opportunities – but it is also because of the quality of higher educatione can’t really stop this outflow, unless we really improve the quality.
The PIE: Are there advantages to Ukrainian students studying abroad as well?
IS: Yes, we have a lot of students who go to study for master’s; I did that myself and I do believe this is highly beneficial for the person. This is what we should support and we don’t have the public funding for that at the moment. We have increased a lot our cooperation with international partners and actually the numbers of students who are going to do their master’s, or credit mobility, has increased. That is very good I believe, the biggest challenge is how to make them come back.
The PIE: How much do you think the students can play a role in changing part of the education system?
“If students were not scared to go on the streets in minus 20 degrees to fight against their president, why should they be afraid of their dean?”
IS: I would say that the student population are very different. We have clearly seen students taking to the streets in protest against the previous government, that is the image that everybody holds in their heads, but it is not representative of the whole student population. Just an example, with my student who is now studying political science, but he was previously studying medicine and he resigned the day after the shootings on the streets of Kiev where a hundred people were killed. He said, “Yes, my fellow students will go to the street protests with me but then we shall come back to university and they will bribe the teachers to pass their exams.”
So that is sort of the problem, people are ready to engage in a fight on a higher level against a corrupt government but they are not always ready to take up the fight inside the university, to go to their department head and say, “Hey, the scores we have taken have really been written down 30 years ago, we really need something more current.”
So my idea is: how do we create institutional mechanisms for students to participate? If they were not scared to go on the streets in minus 20 degrees to fight against their president, why should they be afraid of their dean, but they are. That is the big challenge.
