The Ministry of Education and Science will initiate a system of state grants that will compensate part of the cost of education at universities. The department wants to implement this for bachelorʼs degrees from September 2024.
This was reported by Deputy Minister Mykhailo Vinnytskyi at the 10th Synergy conference.
According to him, this is one of the largest initiatives of the Ministry of Education, which will soon be submitted to the parliament.
State grants can be issued through "Diia" app, and their amount will depend on the results of the independent external evaluation or the national multi-subject test. With this money, students will be able to pay for their studies on a contract basis.
As the official explained, the current system in Ukraine is as follows: the state covers either 100% of the cost of a studentʼs education, or 0%.
"The state does not have the opportunity to increase state orders, since hundreds of billions of funds go to defense. Talking about the fact that we will be able to increase the state budget for education is, unfortunately, unrealistic. What can be done? It is a little different to redistribute the amount of state funds that go to education," Vinnytskyi added.
The Ministry of Education believes that the grant system will encourage students to enter popular and sought-after specialties, in particular, software engineering and computer science.
- In 2023, about 267 000 students entered the bachelorʼs program, of which 67 000 were on the budget. Last year, 226 thousand became undergraduate students.