Janitors with higher education and the never ending ladder

        I guess the word “school” for most of western world means the same as “studying” or “educational establishment” as opposed to post Soviet Union space, where it’s used just for one step of education from three main stages that we have.

The first one is secondary school (or just school), which is compulsory for everybody and consist of 11 grades.  The options are: you might study for 11 years and go to university (at age 17) after or you can leave after 9^th grade (at age 15) and enter then a college – the second step of our education, where you can get some professional training and a degree (small degree) in some profession. Colleges are very different here. For example, some of them are equivalent to community colleges (not for apt pupils), the others are quite serious. You’re supposed to study at college for 4 years. Having some sort of “special secondary education” which is given by college you can start working, give up on all of this or go to the third stage − university, the only one which is used with the adjective “higher”. If anybody is curious, I’ve started working at the 3d year of college.

So, in order to get a higher education you have to study for 4 or 5 years and receive respectively a bachelor’s or master’s degree. Maybe it’s strange, but every employer wants to hire someone with a higher education, no matter in what area you’re going to work. They think that if you are able to finish a university, sweeping the sidewalks won’t be a challenging task for you. But it is not the only explanation, why so many people here study in universities. The second reason is that you can pass all three stages of education without paying any money whatsoever and also be given a scholarship. Of course, it depends on your grades and diligence, but you can actually buy your diploma paying for university according to a contract or illegally. That’s why corruption prospers in most of our higher educational establishments and, frankly speaking, I’ve already become a part of it by writing bachelor and master’s degree papers for some lazy students of my university.

           Did I say there were three stages? So here is the fourth one: so called in western countries postgraduate school, where you can earn your Ph. D. degree by defending your (or somebody else’s) thesis. It’s actually a bit different, than in Europe or the USA, and untranslatable in a direct way, so I’m not going to talk about it further. The most amazing thing that Ph. D. is not the last rung of the ladder…


Posted by Helen