Educational component of Ukraine’s human capital from the perspective of post-war reconstruction
The article analyses the educational component of Ukraine’s human capital with the aim of identifying ways to improve it after the war, considering the pre-war situation and war losses. The authors’ own understanding of the essence of human capital in relation to a particular community is formulated, based on the attitude of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe to the role of this type of capital as a necessary factor of competitiveness in the knowledge economy. It is shown that before the war, the educational component of human capital reproduction as a prerequisite for competitiveness through innovative development, in particular in general secondary and higher education, did not ensure Ukraine’s leading positions in international comparative studies of the quality of education, the world university rankings and the list of countries generating patent applications. Consequently, it did not adequately address the demands of economic growth. The article establishes the absence of a direct link between the innovation activity of countries and two quantitative characteristics of their educational systems: the size of the population with higher education and the number of higher education institutions. The authors determine the shares of personnel and infrastructure losses in general secondary and higher education during the first two years of the war; demonstrate the educational losses of general secondary education students due to obstacles to the provision of quality education in a distance format during the war; show changes in the composition of students by gender and age during the war. It is concluded that wartime educational losses will worsen the quality of human capital during the post-war recovery period, which will require countermeasures. It is proposed that these measures should include the development of a lifelong learning system based on European recommendations with the objective of reaching as many Ukrainians as possible irrespective to their age, who are not involved in the formal education system.
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