Towards the European Union’s Education Standards: Expectations of the Ukrainians

Abstract

IntroductionUkrainian education reforms oriented on Bologna system of higher education implementation are still criticized because of their imperfection, slowness and the lack of institutional strategy. But the main consumers of the reforms and education innovation are students and employers in spite of the fact that in Ukraine state interests dominate over social.Ukrainian system of education inherited a lot of rudiments of Soviet system but during the years of independence it was affected also by its own, contradictory factors of evolution. Public education policy resisted significant wavering which, in turn, stipulated changes in the attitude to the integration to the European higher education and scientific research area: from sincere aspiration to conjunctural adjustments. As Staab (2011) denoted, the European Commission argued that future priorities ought to include sustainable development (termed green growth) innovation and education in a new agenda rebranded the EU 2020 strategy.From March 2014 on, the direction of education policy of Ukraine has radically oriented to the European standards. It was facilitated by the adoption of new Law of Ukraine On Higher Education, the abolishing a number of regulations which increased the excessive bureaucracy of training process.However, institutional factors do not reveal the full potential of Bologna process in Ukraine. They include the experience of command mode of economic management, a government as a main customer of educational services, the limitation of public priorities by adaptation to the government requirements instead of making demands to the education quality. Certainly, the implementation of Bologna process and other European education standards does not guarantee the solution ща the problems with labour market, innovation development etc. because some countries of the European Union meet the same problems according to E. Duľova Spisakova et al. (2016) and H. Stimac and M. Leko Simic (2012) or Smolag et al. (2015). But this will give new opportunities for economic and human capital development in Ukraine.Today the significant place belongs to attraction of students to the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the European Union which anticipates also tourism development, youth problems solution, socio-economic, education and other social problems solution.The detailed analysis of the results of the research is given below. We would like to emphasize that in spite of slow changes in South of Ukraine citizens' opinion concerning the European Union more than a half of citizens support closer relations of Ukraine and the EU, including in education issues.The research goal of the paper is to reveal the attitude of educational process participants in the South of Ukraine to the perspectives of the joining the European Union and full implementation of the European higher education standards in Ukraine with use of sociological survey.The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 is devoted to the empirical background and the studies concerning the attitude to European education standards in transformation economics held before. Section 2 introduces the results of sociological survey of public opinion of Ukrainians about the European Integration and European education standards implementation. It includes the research methodology and the analysis of survey results. Conclusions summarize the research and contain some recommendations for theory, practice, and future research on the topic.1.Literature reviewThere are many sociological studies on Bologna process implementation held by domestic and foreign scientists.Moiseeva and Usachov (2014), Ivanov et al. (2012) indicate that the process of education system integration to European standards is perceived by Ukrainian people ambiguously. Besides different peculiarities and differences in the European and Ukrainian systems there are some traditions that are difficult to break. …