Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

AT THE ORIGINS OF INFORMAL ECONOMIES:
THE UKRAINIAN CASE
pay his bills. Normally, university professors
are paid for their teaching hours, conducting
research and writing in their leisure time. A
salary package would start at 200 US dollars,
increasing with the workload (for instance
if some administrative or teaching tasks are
undertaken). In his case, he is willing to do several
other jobs at the same time and, when we
meet, I usually have to accompany him around
the city to meet the most diverse people before
we can finally sit to drink a tea and chat.
Dimitry is not against accepting ‘presents’ from
students. He says: ‘if the student comes to me
and wants to pass my exam, I know that, if I
fail them, they will bounce around until they
finally pass another exam. Why shall I complicate
things if those people were not born to
study? In exchange, if after the exam they want
to give me a bottle of kon’yak (brandy) or wine,
I shall not refuse’.
Dimitry is not alone, most university professors
have to face the problem of low salaries and
motivation. Some can tap from international
programmes like IREX, CEP (now AFP),
USAID and, more recently, Marie Curie and
receive money for traveling or their research.
However, the majority of them, and especially
those who do not know English and thus
cannot connect with the Western world, are in
a more critical situation. They might
look for a number of remedies: they
page 210 might get a second job at a private
university, using the prestige of the
public one they work for. They might
give private lessons to their students. Or they
might accept informal payments in different
ways and modalities.
Under pressures from the international community,
Ukraine has come to outlaw flowers
and chocolate, a traditional present from
students to the teachers but defined as bribes
in a desperate effort to limit corruption at universities.
However, I have argued that the main
problem is low salaries, rather than greedy
teachers (Polese 2008).
A further question, however, would be why a
student who does not want to study is at the
university. Why are hundreds of such cases
found at the university? The answer is that,
with no university degree, it would be extremely
hard to find a job that is decently paid. With
a high unemployment rate, competition for any
kind of job is great. To succeed, it is necessary
to have higher qualifications than the others,
even to work in a shop or as a cleaner.
Aware of such conditions, parents are willing
to do anything to secure their children a future
and invest their savings into an university
education. With an increasing number of
students willing to enter a university, the first
consequence is that universities accept more
students than they should and classes become
overcrowded. Once a limit is reached, the old
law of supply and demand applies and prices
to enter a university rise. I am not talking of
official prices but, rather, the extra costs parents
will have to pay to secure a place for their
children.
The most prestigious universities become
places where prices are exceedingly high; and
even universities with no real perspective on
the Ukrainian job market (like ethnography or
history) are in demand. Some meritocracy still
applies, but what university is not willing to