Higher Education: Between Yesterday and the Day Before Yesterday?

After reforming secondary education, the Belarusian authorities took a closer look at the system of higher education. The Council of Ministers reviewed the Draft of the State Programme of Higher Education Development for 2008-2010 and in perspective until 2015. The main goal of the Programme is to improve the quality of training specialists. In order to achieve this goal it is important to equip the higher educational establishments with modern material and technical basis, to introduce state-of-the-art technologies into educational process, and to implement an innovative model of development.

“Higher education has to meet and to satisfy the needs of the developing Belarusian economy. The country needs highly qualified specialists. The innovation economy demands innovation in education”, said the Head of the Government, Sergey Sidorsky. The Chairman of the Board of the National Bank of the Republic of Belarus, Petr Prokopovich, stated that “we are going round in circles in this field and are still living in our Soviet ancestry”. Mr. Prokopovich doubted the reasonability of decreasing the number of experts to be trained in the sphere of banking, i.e. economists and financiers. “Over 3,000 young specialists started working in the banks of the country this year. Bearing in mind the rapid development of the banking sector of the economy, the need in experts in this area will only increase”. Talking about the serious drawbacks of the higher educational system, Mr. Prokopovich mentioned weak material and technical basis of higher educational institutions as well as significant shortage of rooms in student dormitories. Today only 57% of students from other towns of Belarus live in student dorms, four dormitories are undergoing capital repairs. He proposed to elaborate a system of loans for higher educational establishments, which could be used to build student dorms, with an interest rate to be paid out of the state budget.

The Minister of Education, Alexander Radkov, pointed to the “insufficient financial resources that could be used to equip higher educational establishments, the latter have out-of-date laboratory equipment (70% is obsolete) and only 52% of the needed space”. Minister Radkov specifically indicated the lack of close relations with the future employers.

Around $2.5 billion is needed in order to realize the mentioned above Programme using the state budget and around $356 million using extra-budgetary resources. In the course of the implementation of the programme it is planned to increase the number of educational, scientific and experimental establishments from 24 in 2008 up to 66 in 2015. There will be more affiliated departments of institutions of higher education: there are 103 of them today and in 2015 there should be 296. It is planned that the leading enterprises and organisations will provide their premises for setting up laboratories and training classes for future specialists.

The Head of the Government underlined that it was necessary to work out approaches with regard to attraction of younger staff at higher educational institutions. “Students should be taught by younger staff with modern views on the development of the innovation type of economy”, said the Prime Minister. Sergey Sidorsky quoted the average age of the staff: in 1995 30% of all professors were older than 60 years old, in 2001 – 60% and in 2008 – 80%. Today half of the readers surpassed their pension age and they are older than 60 years old. However the issue of how to attract talented youth to stay at universities and to continue teaching still remains open.

The Draft Programme was approved as a basis. However it will be further developed in the course of the following month. Mr. Sidorsky said that the Programme should introduce conceptual approaches rather than general ones in order to resolve all the issues of the Belarusian educational system. The Minister of Education expressed an opinion that the financial input into the development of higher education will be returned within 8 to 10 years.

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17 September 2008