In Ukraine, they want to reduce the number of higher education institutions to 100 institutions, – MES

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The Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine plans to reduce the number of higher education institutions up to about 100, although before consolidation there were about 130 of them.

Deputy Minister of Education and Science Mykhailo Vynnytskyi reported this in the Dopamine for Education podcast.

According to him , now there are 121 institutions of higher education in Ukraine, but in the future there will be about a hundred of them.

It is worth noting that this number includes only those universities that are subordinate to the Ministry of Education and Culture. That is, we are not talking about military academies, universities that are subordinate to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications.

Demography shows that 15 years ago we had 630 thousands of school graduates. There will be just over 300,000 graduates this year, and we're saying we're moving towards a 250,000 real potential student base. And the network was built for 600 thousand. Obviously, it should be reduced, the deputy minister noted.

He notes that the average number of students in universities in Europe is about 10,000. Whereas in Ukraine – 5.7 thousand.

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Vynnytskyi says that our country will never have 20-30 higher education institutions due to a certain important phenomenon – city-forming universities. These are institutions of higher education in Ostroh, Glukhiv, Nizhyn, Bila Tserkva, Drohobych.

These are small universities that will never be some big lights and will never be in the world rankings, but they are extremely important for these communities. And in fact, as the Ostroh Academy has shown, they can be very high-quality centers that will give a head start to universities located in a large regional center, the official explained.

According to Mykhailo Vinnytskyi, there are cities where the improvement of the higher education network it has already been done, and consolidation has not even started in some.

In Lviv it has already been done, in Odesa it is still necessary to start, in Dnipro a lot has already been done, in Kyiv – something has been done. Kharkiv is a painful topic, because it is obviously not the right time to modernize the network when students and teachers are constantly under fire, Mykhailo Vynnytskyi noted.

He emphasizes that reducing the number of higher education institutions is not an end in itself. It's not about saving money. It is about creating capable communities that have a certain weight, where students have the opportunity to choose individual educational trajectories, where there is an opportunity to invest in scientific infrastructure.

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