Andrei Laurukhin: Adoption of the new innovational higher education path of development

Andrei Laurukhin

It is already a year that the National Higher Education Development Program for 2011-2015 has been implemented (approved by the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Belarus, №893, of July 1, 2011)

 Being interested in the higher education and science fields, I asked my colleagues from the state universities to tell about the first results of the higher education development. The vast majority expressed sincere surprise on the subject of the Program existence and asked me to amplify the subject, as to what the program was about, who had adopted it and so on. The reaction has been strange, of course, but herewith rather explainable: it is our domestic custom not to discuss programs with representatives of the professional and expert community as well as with the general public, i.e. with all the social partners who are somehow involved in the education process. No wonder thus that no one from the higher education institutions’ (HEI) faculty members is aware of the Program existence (except, of course, the Ministry for Education officials and the top management of the higher education institutions themselves). I wish they were, as there are things to discuss.

First of all, the higher school development projections announced in the Program, are impressive (where the annual prognostic indicators tables for 2011-2015 years make up 5/6 of the Program). By the year 2015 it is planned to train 147 thousand university graduated experts and 9 thousand holders of a master’s degree; to renovate teaching and laboratory base of state HEIs by at least 25%; to create 76 scientific production associations and 340 branches of the departments in the high-tech organizations and institutions of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus (the NASB); to increase the volume of exports of educational services' threefold and bring it up to $186,71 million and others. There is one key-note behind these quantitative indices – the adoption of the innovational path of development thesis. It means that the HEI strength of development must lie in its research component. However, the question is how powerful this strength of this engine is? As it is no secret that research work (RW) in our HEIs occupies marginal position, which is gradually worsening with the annually decreasing budget and increasing commercialization of the higher education sphere. The work in HEIs for the faculty members means, primarily, administration and teaching because of one simple reason – it is possible yet to live on the money obtained for this work. If the scientific constituent of the teaching staff is financed, it is made on the leftovers, as to preserve the academic status and for the accountability. It is hardly understandable how one can speak about the expert training for the science-consuming economy with such a motivation structure.

For truth’s sake it should be noted that the program presupposes rather big financial allocations on the research work in HEIs: 2675,5 milliard rubles as of April 1, 2011 (2036,1 mlrd rubles from the funds of the state budget). But honestly, it is unknown, how much efficiently these funds can be drawn. As a rule, three things make up the key factors of the efficiency in project financing: personnel, management system and infrastructure.

The personnel problem has long become a proverb and a byword. In particular, the Program (Chapter 2) indicates that the quantity of the Doctors of Philosophy of the retirement age in HEIs has surpassed 60%. I should add that the situation with candidates of science is better, though not so considerably as there are more than 40% of pensioners among them. A logical question appears in this respect: what innovations we are talking about in case of the personnel who got their higher education 40-50 years ago? Apparently, this question was not alien to the authors of the Program, as rejuvenation of the HEIs faculty is declared as one of its key objectives. Somewhat strange, though, looks a thesis on “Training the employment pool of the faculty” at the expense of the graduate school institution (Chapter 4). Thus, it is apparently assumed that the graduate school will play a “proto-postgraduate” role, as it did before? But is it possible that simple quantitative increase of the time of postgraduate studies increases the quality of the research studies? And how it will comply with the Bologna process (the planned accession to which is to “contribute to the quality assurance of the university graduated experts”)? As far as graduate studies in the Bologna model is only the secondary level of the higher education, not a form of scientists’ training. Finally, even if we will manage to reach the critical mass of HEIs under- and postgraduates, whom will these young intellects get innovational ideas from? Who will implement the assessment and evaluation of the quality of the research work – will it be the same Higher Attestation Commission (HAC)? The Program leaves it untold, proposing a number of standard methods for the development of the potential of personnel that we have been using “without that fuss” for two decades already: “moral and financial encouragement”, the NASB scheme of payment distribution on HEIs (as if in the NASB it has already solved the problem with the shortage of personnel), invitation of foreign university lecturers, participation of Belarusan scientists in the international doctoral programs, etc.. Perhaps the only new measure for the development of the personnel potential is “the contractually based annual assignment at least 20 (from the planned 40000 thousand of the full-time graduates! – italics by Andrei Laurukhin, A.L.) best HEI graduates for master’s courses in the leading scientific and educational centers together with the Master’s course of the CIS Network University (A.L.) within the international agreements, international programs and projects, funded from the state budget.

Unfortunately, the Program does not provide any intelligible clarifications of the changes in the management system. Apparently, it means that the system remains the same, namely the command one. We have first-hand knowledge on how much this system contributes the development of the personal creative potential. By the way, a similar spirit can be felt in such prognostic indicator as the quantity of experts with engineering education (it is this very specialization that is taken as a unit of measure) – according to the Program, there should be no less than 30% of such alumni from the total number of the graduates. Still they say that this level complies with the European standards. Herewith, it is not specified that European standards presuppose qualitative rather than quantitative indicators. But quantity does not turn to quality by itself, which is evident from the bitter experience of the USSR, where the share of technically educated students in their overall ratio made 44% (compared with 12,3% in the USA, 14,4% - in Great Britain, 4,6% - in France, 20,1% - in Japan). Despite the fourfold dominance of the technically educated graduates in USSR when compared to the world’s leading countries, neither USSR nor post-soviet countries managed to reach that level of science linkage in economy as the world advanced countries, that aimed not only at the development of the natural-scientific, technical and applied subjects, but also at forming a free, responsible and creative person as a main social and manufacturing resource. Since innovative economies are not only and not so much an economical phenomenon, but rather a social one: a free creative personality entering the social interaction with ones similar to him and adhering to principally new values (those of freedom, self-realization, social justice and others) comes into the spotlight. It is evident that creative personality is a much more complicated, self-sufficient and barely manageable entity of social relations, rather than a “team-worker” who is subject to simple disciplinary practice and is guided by material incentives.

As the experience of the most successful modern projects shows (in all kinds of spheres, from education to soft production), the work staff adhering to traditional economical motivations and disciplinary management methods always loses. And this is one of the most serious challenges for the modern managers: whether to practice habitual disciplinary-economical management methods and lose, or to agree to time, moral and other costs connected with alteration of yourself, of the system and traditions, but to risk and win? Judging by the Program, the adoption of the innovational path for Belarus is seen mainly in engineering terms, without any transformations of the management model and renovation of the value system. The prognostic indicators tables look like well-composed arithmetic progressions, which probably are aimed to instill hope in the mathematical inevitability of the automatic transfer of the quantity to the quality. The Program admits the quantitative uncertainty only in relation to students of humanitarian disciplines, about whose destinies the following was said: “There are going to be modifications of the admission on a number of humanitarian and pedagogical subjects”. What exactly it can mean, is difficult to say, but judging by the tone and by already existing practice, unlikely anything good. And it’s a pity, as according to the recently made public opinion polls, the vast majority of Belarusans are not satisfied with their jobs and feel much more unhappy at work than the other CIS countries’ citizens (of Russian Federation, for instance).

Perhaps HEI infrastructural renovation plans seem the most decisive and innovatory: “In order to provide science, education and industry integration, creation of new branches of the departments at the high-tech enterprises and NASB institutions is planned, as well as the creation of scientific, production and training complexes on the HEI basis. In order to mobilize managers and leading experts of scientific and manufacturing organizations to department management normative-legal base will be upgraded”. An intention to connect science, education and industry is fairly clear, as without such connection it is impossible to talk about innovative economy at all. The question here is in how effective this interaction will be? If I got the authors of the Program right, one of the means to increase efficiency is the creation of new structures on the border of science, education and industry, such as business-incubators, industrial parks and others that should be managed by representatives of the three above mentioned fields, scientific, industrial and educational. The need for such integration is all too obvious. A vivid example of this can be Belarus Hi Tech Park (the HTP), whose director (V. Tsepkalo) year in has been complaining of the impossibility to find prospective graduates of the IT-programs able to join the HTP staff (despite the annually graduating programmers from Belarusan HEIs). As a result, the HTP has begun to provide educational services to their own staff, aiming to increase their professional development, i.e. to undertake the functions of a HEI (generally, by inviting foreign lecturers). However, the practice of “re-education” on the job places takes place everywhere: everybody graduated from a Belarusan HEI is advised to forget everything that he/she used to know in the course of the five-year education. Though this gap between education and industry is due not only to the practice-estranged and too theoretical knowledge (and because of that useless), but with the outdated manufacturing technologies as well. And though the Program gives orientation on the 5^th – 6^th economic structures, even occasional innovatively-receptive Belarusan enterprises predominantly need the innovations of the 3^rd – 4^th technological structure (conveyor technologies in heavy engineering, oil processing, etc.). What will a graduate who’s supposedly managed to get up-to-date knowledge about the 5^th- 6^th economic structures do on the domestic manufacture of the 3^rd – 4^th structure? The Program leaves it unexplained.

The same thing can be said about the production sphere demand for the scientific output (as well as the subjects producing it). As it was noted earlier, currently the infrastructural element that implemented these functions in the Soviet times and was a connecting link in the chain from the science to the industry, namely, design engineering and experience bureaus, was practically reduced to nothing. Will the new infrastructural elements manage to make up this link on a qualitatively new level and carry out the long-awaited meeting of the science, education and manufacture? It is obvious that success here will depend on how strong the interest of the manufacture, science, education and business representatives is. And one can know it only in case of the free will to cooperation under competitive activity that rejects an ineffective owner of the goods and services (including scientific and educational ones). Unfortunately, the impression is that the Program makes no provision for such possibility, but relies on the established distribution scheme and government order that are slightly renewed technologically. Thus, a good old principle of state plan is proclaimed in the Chapter 4 of the Program, “The perspective labor requirement for economic and social spheres was analyzed, out of which key figures of admission into state HEIs on the full-time education at the expense of the state budget will be formed, allowing for priority directions and emerging demographic situation”. As well as the government order: “According to the labor market changes evoked from the adoption of the new innovational higher education path of the country’s development, key figures of admission will be annually adjusted through the automatized system “Personnel-training order”. The Program is planning to incline the only non-governmental player on the market of educational services, i.e. private universities, to cooperation in the question of “growth of the experts with higher technological and natural-science education training…for account of the step-by-step extension of their training in private universities based on the interaction and cooperation with state HEIs”. The state has force for such cooperation that private universities cannot beat, namely: private universities have provision for the considerate decrease in the admission for correspondence courses”.

Summing up the acquaintance with the Program, two things should be noted. Firstly, the Program makes all the participants and HEIs’ social partners understand that there is a need for changes both in the higher education system and in the system of science and in the economy of Belarus. The evidence to this is the slogan about the adoption of the innovation path of development, which has been wandering from document to document for several years already and has all chances to become a motto of new official Belarusan ideology. However, in the second place the Program makes it clear for all social partners for cooperation in the sphere of education, science and economy that this adoption of the new path of development will be carried out through the use of the old methods and with preservation of the existing social interaction system, in which the role of first fiddle will play the state bureaucratic elite, as it used to be. All in all, everybody can feel quiet: mediocre education, science and economic subjects will experience no risk and discomfort from meeting with the unknown. And it means that adoption of the new innovation path of development can prove to be so smooth and integral, that it will even remain unnoticed (which is evident from a successfully passed first year of its implementation).

About the author: Andrei Laurukhin, Associate  Professor,  Head  of  Philosophy  Department,  EHU,  Lithuania; PhD, 2001, St. Petersburg State University, “Our opinion”.