Education Ministry officials said the agency has no statistics about how common bribery is at Ukrainian universities, and the head of the higher education department, Mykola Dmytrychenko, was unavailable to be interviewed for this story. At most universities there is a code of silence, so complaints are rare. We are not a prosecutor s office or the police, after all. Mazepa, of the pedagogical university, said that the problem is so ingrained in universities, it will not be easy to solve merely by punishing a few students and firing some teachers. It has a social and economic origin.
Schools can t stop it on their own.
We, as future teachers, probably realize that better than others. Mazepa believes that if students got bigger stipends and professors earned decent salaries, corruption at schools would stop. Berezhenko doubts that. Both students and professors benefit from it, so they are not interested in changing it.