Uzbek Students Concerned at Work Placements

Grant-maintained students starting out on a university course in Uzbekistan now face the daunting prospect of having to work for three years after graduation in a job assigned to them by the authorities.



First- and second-year students who have been forced to sign compulsory work contracts are concerned at being locked into poorly-paying public-sector jobs, and the move is likely to deter many school-leavers from applying to universities and colleges around the country.



The contracts have been drawn up on the basis of a decree issued by President Islam Karimov back in June, but because they have been issued a third of the way into the academic year, new students who started in September were never given the option of refusing a university place.



In many cases students will find themselves assigned to a rural school, whatever career plans they may have had. The contract says the idea is to ensure everyone has a job they graduate, but opponents of the scheme say the university-leavers will be tied down to a post with poor prospects and little or no pay in the cash-strapped public sector.



Only those who receive government grants are affected, while students able to pay their own way, who already account for most of those in higher education, are unaffected. This is likely to accentuate the divide between the privileged minority and the majority from low-income homes, who in the Soviet period would have benefited from free education.



After Uzbekistan became independent in 1991, the state was no longer prepared to support the old system of universal access to free higher education, and scaled down the quota of those eligible for a state grant in favour of paid tuition. Since six out of ten in this population of 26 million are under 25, this latest measure is likely to further restrict opportunities for the majority, with implications for Uzbekistan’s intellectual and economic development.



According to the quota for this academic year, only four out of ten undergraduates and just a quarter of those on master’s courses will get a government grant. Although annual fees ranging between 350 and 750 US dollars might seem modest to someone from the West, they make paying one’s way out of the question for most people since average wages are between 50 and 100 dollars a month.



Grant-supported places are an increasingly scarce commodity. “I’ve been trying to get into university for three years now,” said a student from Namangan, a major city in the eastern Fergana valley region. “But I never score enough points to qualify for a state grant. I can’t pay the fees as I don’t work and my parents earn barely enough to cover utilities and food.”



An employee at the education ministry justified the change by saying, “The state spends a lot of money on grant-supported higher education. But recently we’ve been getting a lot of complaints that there’s a dearth of [professional-level] specialists in the state institutions.”



The conditions placed on grant-maintained students is likely to put many off applying. Although the change is supposed to apply to new entrants only, those already in their second year have found they too are have had to sign contracts.



One second-year student in Namangan said, “There are five grant students studying in our group, and we were all given contracts stating that we’d have to work in whichever institution our university sends us to after we complete our studies. We said we were under no obligation to sign any contract as we’d never heard of such a law, but they told us it was orders from the ministry. So [almost] everyone signed, and anyone who didn’t got called in by the dean and given a talking to.”



Like many first- and second-years, this student was angry that the rules had been imposed late in the day and made to look retroactive. “We were annoyed that we had to backdate the contract, as if we’d signed it back in September at the beginning of the academic year,” he said.



The imposition of a retrospective arrangement is a problem for one Namangan lawyer, who says that while in principle the government has the right to make graduates repay their grant through work, contracts should only have been signed by those newly enrolling for the 2005-06 academic year. “They should have signed them before they started studying; they should have been given the right to choose whether to study under these terms,” he said.



A Namangan university staff member suggested that the new rules were simply a more systematic way of enforcing a practice that until now was conducted by withholding degree certificates from anyone who decided against working for the public sector.



“The university used to have instructions from the [education] ministry to restrict as far as possible the issue of diplomas to grant-maintained students who did not intend to work at a state institutions,” said this staff member. “But there was frequently an outcry about this, and the university doesn’t have legitimate grounds to withhold diplomas. So the decision was made to correct the error and sign contracts with all students who get grants.”



It seems likely that many of the graduates will be sent to work in schools, similar to the system of compulsory assignment for graduate teachers that operated in Soviet times. Those already in the teaching profession warn that the job has little to offer.



“I have worked as a teacher all my life, and I can’t imagine how my son will feed his family if he works as a schoolteacher on such a salary,” said a teacher who has a son studying a Fergana State University. “The constitution states that no one can be forced to work, so I consider it illegal for our children to be forced to sign a contract for compulsory work.



“It will be a major problem for graduates to work in jobs assigned them by the university. Now there are only women working at my school; all the male teachers have gone to work in Russia.



“Younger people want to work in the city. I can understand that: there’s at least some future there, and what can they expect here in the village? Cold classrooms and desks dating from Soviet times? And even if I have to employ graduates, I will not be able to provide them with a full salary, since even now, not everyone here is getting full pay.”



Female attendance at university has fallen disproportionately since the end of communism, because, faced with hard economic choices, many families opt not to fund their daughters’ education, so that they are limited to a future as a housewife. This latest restriction could further reduce the numbers, as the mother of a female student in Namangan explained.



“This new rule completely ignores our national traditions,” she said. “What if a woman is sent somewhere to work after her studies, but her husband doesn’t want her to - what will she do then? Will she be left with no diploma? Although my daughter has another two and a half years to go, I am already worrying about how she will get her diploma.”



One former student suspects that some graduates will still find creative ways to evade the system. He successfully arranged a false work placement for himself to satisfy the university authorities. “Everyone knew the contract was fictitious. The university was obliged to report that it had provided workplaces for all its graduates, and if we hadn’t signed this contract, they would have threatened not to give us our diplomas,” he said.



“In the end, we all put in money to buy these contracts with a private firm. So a small firm with just one manager and one accountant undertook to provide jobs for 20 graduates.”



(Names of interviewees have been withheld out of concern for their security.)