Private education and the Ternopil Institute of Economics and Entrepreneurship (02/02/97)

Private education and the Ternopil Institute of Economics and Entrepreneurship

by Andrij Kudla Wynnyckyj
Toronto Press Bureau

TORONTO - The visit to Canada's financial capital by Dr. Olena Bilous, rector of the Ternopil Institute of Economics and Entrepreneurship (TIEE), offered an interesting glimpse into the burgeoning sector of private education in Ukraine.

Dr. Bilous was here as a representative of a privately funded school from western Ukraine exploring the practices of Toronto's academic schools of economics and business. While virtually all aspects of post-secondary education in Ontario are public, that is, governmentally funded, Dr. Bilous's arrival in the provincial capital was hardly ill-advised or ill-timed, given the privatizing mood of the incumbent Conservative government.

The Ternopil native's sojourn lasted a month, beginning in mid-November 1996, and included informal meetings with Ukrainian Canadian economist Dr. Basil Kalymon, professor of finance at the University of Toronto, and director of the management faculty's international exchange program.

The TIEE, which Dr. Bilous was instrumental in establishing, was founded in the fall of 1993, and officially licensed as a degree-issuing institution by Ukraine's Ministry of Education in June 1995.

Two other senior TIEE officials assisted in the founding, Pavlo Fedyk, who now serves as vice rector responsible for curriculum and preparation of new cadres; and Volodymyr Hryshchuk, administrative vice-rector of academic affairs.

Dr. Bilous prefers to call the TIEE a "non-governmental institute of higher learning" (NIGHL), a designation officially applied in Ukraine to private schools. An association of these NGIHLs held its first general meeting in Kyiv on September 5, 1996, attended by newly appointed Education Minister Mykhailo Zghurovskyi.

She said NGIHLs are subjected to much more stringent regulations than state-controlled institutions, and that bureaucrats from the Ministry of Education often send commissions of inquiry to interfere in the workings of private academies. "We're seen as competition, and we are the competition," Dr. Bilous said matter-of-factly.

Without the patronizing zeal characteristic of many privatizers, Dr. Bilous, a veteran of the state-run system, was sympathetic to the plight facing public education. "Ukraine's educational system is predicated on an excellent idea, but it's yoked to a government facing dire economic difficulties," she observed.

"Inescapably, because private schools can be more flexible in their ability to gather and administer funds, they will, at least in the short term if not for a considerable time, be able to offer a superior environment for learning (which the Ternopil-based teacher defined as class size and availability for direct contact with instructors), higher quality instruction, and more up-to-date teaching materials and tools - such as computers," Dr. Bilous said.

A flexible approach to funding? According to Dr. Bilous, her school secures its assets by investing its free liquid assets in what is known as "optova torhivlia" (bulk trading) of goods.

Despite the tinge of antagonism between the public and private, the two sides are not blindly unaccommodating. NGIHL administrators and faculty are included in consultative sessions on preparing legislation governing the country's educational system, the pedagogue said.

According to Dr. Bilous, about 5 percent of Ukraine's student body are presently enrolled in private schools of various kinds, and the vast majority of the 120 or so institutions are located in cities of the country's central, eastern and southeastern economic heartland, such as Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Cherkasy and Kharkiv. The capital, Kyiv, boasts 34 private academies, she said.

And yet, the private schools are not all-powerful economic dynamos. Virtually all institutions in the fields of the pure and applied sciences remain in the public sector, Dr. Bilous said, because of the substantial costs involved in maintaining research laboratories - costs that, as of yet, no private Ukrainian concern is capable of bearing.

Dr. Bilous told The Weekly that although she has her hands full with administrative tasks, she continues to draw on the 16 years of teaching experience she gained after graduating from the Ternopil Academy of Husbandry, with a degree in economic analysis.

The full-time faculty of the Ternopil Institute of Economics and Entrepreneur-ship has included up to 20 scholars, with a total of 56 instructors on contract. Further underscoring the differences between public and private, Dr. Bilous said: "They are paid twice a month."

Salaries are comparable with those offered by state institutions, but as is widely known, while the latter are frequently behind in their payments to their instructors, the TIEE never has been, claims the rector.

The other essential differences between private and public post-secondary institutions in Ukraine as posited by Dr. Bilous began with the most obvious. Tuition fees are paid up front. She revealed that on average, these come to $410 (U.S.) per annum (about $300 for first-year courses, up to $550 for final-year courses, depending on the program).

While Dr. Bilous was loath to say so, she conceded the fact that because of the dire economic straits in which teachers find themselves (coupled with the corruption rampant in the society), very few, if any students enrolled in "free" public educational institutions manage to attend them without paying fees for the schooling they receive, in one fashion or another.

Apart from the four-year B.A.s offered by the TIEE, it also offers two-week courses for professionals and businessmen, another major source of revenue. This is also a facet of its innovativeness, Dr. Bilous said. According to its proud rector, the TIEE offers the only course on securities in western Ukraine.

Despite the far-reaching differences between public and private institutions, similarities remain. Not only is the TIEE affiliated with the Academy of Husbandry at Ternopil, it also has common programs. "State bodies continue to dictate curriculum, but schools such as ours have input into how this curriculum is set, and a greater degree of flexibility in how it is taught," Dr. Bilous said.

Dr. Bilous explained that the TIEE's approach to the field is somewhat different than in the West. To begin with, all courses are mandatory. The first year is replete with seminars in the humanities - Ukrainian and international culture, history, the basis of law - as well as basic mathematics and political economy. In the second year come statistics, political economy in depth, macro- and micro-economics; in the third, management, marketing, financing and accounting; and in the fourth, in-depth revisiting of the above fields plus taxation and business ethics.

Although training a new generation of economists and entrepreneurs for Ukraine, both Dr. Bilous and the TIEE are also attuned to the outside world. The academic groups to which individual students are assigned are based on their proficiency in foreign languages.

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