Ukrainian scholars report:
According to the results of a survey conducted in October 2013, 30% of the Ukrainians surveyed consider the quality of higher education to be low or very low. According to the survey, 45% consider the quality of higher education average, and 15% consider it rather high or very high.
ZN.UA. A third of Ukrainians do not believe in the quality of higher education.
I conducted a survey among my acquaintances on the social network “Vkontakte” and got a similar result:
Any government of independent Ukraine — democratic (Kuchma, Yanukovych), nationalist (Kravchuk, Yushchenko) — has always been united in destroying higher education. Economic methods were used for this: cutting spending on education and science, laughable salaries for faculty.
Society did not stay on the sidelines of this process. Social methods were added to the economic methods of destruction: universities came to be seen as a place where you can “dodge the army,” “get a piece of paper so you can get hired,” while the formerly honorable job of teacher is now considered the lot of losers.
Business also wouldn’t mind taking a kick at the education system: here one can recall my note about how McDonald’s assessed higher education.
But I’ll tell you some good news and a big secret. The good news is that there are still students who make their way through thorns to the stars, keep studying conscientiously, and squeeze the most out of the situation as it is.
And the big secret is that the statistics above are a mirror that quite accurately reflects the number of sharp students. 10–15% of students in a group are sharp kids. 40–50% are average. The remaining 30–40% are made up of skippers, D-and-C students, or just dumbasses. Thus, it is very easy to find out a person’s level of preparation simply by asking how they feel about the quality of the knowledge they received.