International Higher Education, Winter 2005

Confronting Corruption: Ukrainian Private Higher Education

Joseph Stetar, Oleksiy Panych, and Bin Cheng
Joseph Stetar is a professor of higher education at Seton Hall University. Oleksiy Panych, and Bin Cheng are part of Seton Hall University research group writing the history of Ukrainian private higher education since independence in 1991. Address: Seton Hall University, Kozlowski Hall, South Orange, NJ 07079, USA. E-mail: Stetarjo@shu.edu.

The vice rector of a leading state university in Ukraine stated in an interview that allegations of bribery for such actions as admission to the university, passing courses, and recommendations were the misguided thinking of “hooligans and malcontents.” While other Ukrainian academics are also willing to make the dubious claim that they had never seen anyone taking bribes, the allegations of substantial if not pervasive corruption in all sectors of Ukrainian higher education persist. Now that approximately 175 private institutions of higher education have attained some level of accreditation, it is important to try and understand the challenges facing that sector as a result of corruption.

Licensing and Accreditation
The main area of corruption appears to be centered in the Ministry of Education and the large state universities controlling licensing and accreditation. In spring 2004 interviews were conducted with 43 rectors, vice rectors, and administrators at five private universities—located in Lviv, Odessa, Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Kyiv. A consensus emerged that successful licensing or accreditation applications, with few exceptions, required some form of bribery. Licensing, which is required only of private institutions, might require a bribe of U.S.$200—about two months’ salary for a typical academic—while accreditation might call for a 10 or 20 times greater “gratuity.”

Obviously, the role of bribery in Ukrainian higher education has become corrosive, and a small number of education leaders from both the private and state sectors are beginning to challenge the system. However, the leaders in the private sector largely acknowledge that the culture of bribery is deeply ingrained in society as well as in higher education and that bribes are part of the cost of getting a private university licensed and accredited. In his remarks, the rector of the private university in Odessa captured the beliefs of the private higher education leaders we interviewed: “if an American university, with exclusively Nobel prize–winning teaching staff, decided to transfer its base of operations to Ukraine, it would fail to get a license (without a bribe, of course) and could only dream of accreditation.”

Student and Faculty Perspectives
To explore other areas of corruption situated within private higher education institutions, we supplemented our interviews by surveying a sample of 77 faculty and 239 students at the same five private universities where we interviewed rectors and other administrators in spring 2004. To encourage reliable responses, students and faculty were guaranteed confidentiality.

Students and faculty at the institutions surveyed share, with few exceptions, a common understanding of what constitutes academic corruption. For example, more than 80 percent of faculty and students described accepting money in exchange for a favorable grade as inappropriate. Similar views are held with respect to the awarding of a favorable entrance examination grade. An even stronger consensus emerged as to whether it was appropriate for a student to have to pay money—over and above the officially set cost—to obtain a place in a student hostel, for a teacher to request sexual relations in exchange for a favorable grade, or for a student to be required to pay for borrowing a book from the university library. In those instances, more than 95 percent of faculty and students viewed such actions as unacceptable. Faculty and students were considerably more accepting of practices such as professors accepting money, in private arrangements, for consulting with a student outside of normal classroom hours or requiring a student to purchase their books and provide proof of this purchase.

Student and Faculty Experiences
There were consistent responses from students and faculty concerning their direct experiences with corruption. More than 90 percent of the students and 95 percent of the faculty reported they had neither experienced nor knew of situations in which bribes were used to gain a favorable grade on an entrance exam or a course examination at their university. Similarly, there is little suggestion from either students or faculty of bribes being used to secure a place in a student hostel or paying a librarian to borrow a book from a university library. Finally, no data exist to indicate any personal experiences of sexual favors between faculty and students for favorable grades, although we recognize that data on this latter aspect of corruption may be the most difficult to obtain.

Few differences also seem to exist between faculty and student experience with what is characterized as “petty corruption.” For example, approximately 10 percent of the students acknowledged they had either paid a professor or were personally aware of a situation in which a student had paid a professor for assistance outside of the classroom. Similarly, 12 percent of faculty indicated they had either experienced or personally knew of situations where money or gifts were exchanged for consultation outside the classroom. About the same percentage of students and faculty reported either personally being in or knowing of a situation in which students were required to purchase a book written by their professor and provide proof of purchase.

While our sample is small and the private institutions studied clearly seek to be “corruption-free universities,” the data suggest these five private universities have been able to foster an institutional culture in which students and faculty agree on what constitutes corruption and have been able, especially when compared to reports from some of the other former republics (see IHE no. 37, Fall 2004), to create relatively “clean” institutions. Our interviews with the leaders of these institutions suggest a clear understanding of the conditions fostering corruption as well as a determination to root out behavior undermining the academic integrity of their institutions.

While it is unknown whether these findings might apply to other Ukrainian private universities, data collected in our earlier studies suggest a considerable number of institutions, driven by the profit motive and resistant to even a hint of transparency, have little concern for academic integrity. Nevertheless, this initial data collection seems to show that, if they make academic integrity a fundamental building block of their institutional culture, private universities can create a climate to combat the grim perspectives of corruption overshadowing higher education systems in the former Soviet Union.