Our university is currently discussing dual education. In dual education, a student gets part of their knowledge at the university and part at a company. For example, Germany has had a system for 40 years where the student gets 50% of their knowledge at a company and 50% at uni. Without a contract with an employer, you can’t enroll in a higher education institution. The company pays the student a small, but still a salary.

In Germany, they split the semester into two-week blocks: one block the student works, and the other they study. That’s more convenient, because the company may be in one city and the uni in another.

At the end of the semester, a committee meets: a university instructor, a company employee, and they assess the quality of the student’s knowledge. In other words, they hold an exam. It’s noted that requirements at companies are usually higher than at uni, so the student’s knowledge is much better too.

In this way, the Germans solved several problems at once:

— the gap between theoretical science and practical science;
— 90% of bachelor’s graduates are employed and work well at their companies;
— students have money to live on.

The dual form of education is not new. Henry Ford writes about the same kind of system in his autobiographical book. He organized a school for 700 boys, who studied in the classroom for one week and worked on the shop floor for three weeks.

In Kharkiv, a great many students work while also studying at the university. We have the very same problems as the Germans and Ford did: the gap between the university and real life, issues of employment and earning money.

Students have been working in my organization since 2006. How could we gradually start legalizing this situation?

  1. The university publishes curricula and requirements for the quality of knowledge in the disciplines.
  2. The company and the student choose which disciplines they could close out. For example: programming, databases, OOP, data structures and algorithms, internet technologies can very easily be learned at the company in the course of developing a mobile application or a website.
  3. The head of the company sends a letter addressed to the rector of the university.
  4. The university automatically arranges free attendance for the student in the selected disciplines.
  5. At the company, the student puts the syllabus and the discipline requirements on the desk next to them and works from it every day.
  6. At the end of the semester, a committee meets: an instructor, a company representative, who assess the quality of the student’s knowledge.

I want to emphasize that this is not some form of “mutual credit,” like, if you work as a programmer, then I’ll give you credit for programming. The student still has to pass the exam, because the requirements for everyone’s knowledge have to be the same. For example, students with 1.5 years of work experience have come to my exam who didn’t know unit testing, and unit testing is a required topic in my course.

We could start with at least one discipline per semester.

The Germans did this in 40 years. Maybe we’ll manage to do it in at least 20. Then, who knows, maybe 50/50 will work out.