Enterpreneurship and problems of specialists training in Ukraine

• absence of serious investments in small business including foreign ones.

In 1997, a business center of International Finance Corporation was established in Zhitomir, its
activity is directed on development of small and medium business through consulting and assistance
in business plans creation for the search of investments.

2. Analysis of Tendencies in the Sphere of Specialists Training during the

Transitional Period to the Marked Economy

Ukraine has deep roots and long established traditions in education, the first Ukrainian university,-
Kiyivo-Mogilyanska Academy,-was founded in 1632.

The Soviet Union Constitution declared the right to education absolutely free of charge ( actually at
the expense of the state budget). On the level of secondary education this right was realized. High
education was in the Soviet Union and continues to be in Ukraine as a kind of elitarian since only
36% of school graduates were ensured of places at institutions of higher education.

We should like to underline the fact that in the former Soviet Union only the state educational
establishments were allowed to function and only source of their financing was the state budget.

After the independence declaration Ukraine confronted several problems in the sphere of
education:

• specialists training management was directed from Moscow, not from Kiyiv;

• teaching process at the majority of institutions of higher education was conducted in Russian,
that is why textbooks and terminology in new fields of science in Ukrainian were absent;

• some specialties were not even taught in Ukraine (e.g. oriental languages );

• graduates from Ukrainian institutes of higher education were sent to work at enterprises of the
whole Soviet Union;

• institutes of higher education were focused on mass specialists’ training for enterprises of
military industrial complex;

• there was observed disbalance in specialists’ training in certain fields of science: approximately
70% of specialists were in natural sciences, engineers and agricultural specialists, while a small
percent were economists and legal advisors, managers were not even trained at all (table 2
presents data of 1995 when the proportion little bit changed );

• uneven concentration of institutes of higher education in Ukraine in several centers,-Kiyiv,
Kharkiv, Donetsk, Odessa, Dnepropetrivesk and Lviv,- the lion share, when population of other
regions (especial Zakarpatie and Zhitomir regions ) is deprived of such opportunity to obtain
higher education (table 3);

• financing of education was done by residual principle which resulted in low salaries of teachers
and bad technical-material base of education in general.

Tables 1 and 2 present some statistical data of the Ministry of Education of Ukraine.

Table 2. Specialists Training in Spheres of Knowledge (in % from total enrollment) in 1995

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