Crowdfunding campaign: Help us to make education at KSE accessible to students from all over Ukraine

The cost of quality education is always high, for students coming from non-Kyiv regions, the issue of funding their education is particularly difficult. As our regular questionnaires suggest, the high cost of living in Kyiv (away from parents) is what bars many potential applicants from the regions from studying at KSE even with the prospect of getting a full-tuition waiver. For this very reason, in recent years, the share of KSE students with undergraduate degrees from non-Kyiv universities also dropped from around one third to below 10%.

To respond to this call, in the summer of 2016, KSE has launched a new initiative aimed at supporting talented students from regional universities. In addition to giving merit-based scholarships (tuition waivers) to study in the two-year MA Program in Economic Analysis, the School also provided regional students with grants for their living expenses in Kyiv (a dormitory and a monthly stipend). Our objective behind this initiative was to give applicants from regional universities, many of which come from underprivileged backgrounds, similar access to high quality education and boost their prospects of successful business or academic careers afterwards.

As a result, owing to this initiative, 11 students from all over Ukraine study in the Program at the moment. We contracted four rooms in a private student hostel for these students (shared space) and provided them with a monthly stipend of UAH 1,500 for their living expenses (this is conditional on students’ academic performance: they should maintain their GPA at the level of at least B for the duration of their studies.)

With this crowdfunding call, we are asking you to support these talented students also during their second year of studies in 2017/18 academic year, providing them with support for their living expenses in Kyiv.

Our target amount is UAH 427,000 to be raised by September 2017. Out of them:

• UAH 165,000 for monthly stipends (UAH 1,500 per month per student for 11 students)
• UAH 262,000 for four rooms in the hostel “Podilskiy” for the period of September 2017-June 2018

Without such support, only 3 out of these 11 regional students would have applied  and studied  at KSE. As of September 1, the KSE MA Program in Economic Analysis has enrolled 37 students, 32% of which are regional students . Regional students are still underrepresented, and we would like to be able to offer support to an even larger number of qualified regional applicants next year. In particular, we would like to set a target of 20 regional students to be enrolled into the KSE MA Program in Economic Analysis in the fall of 2017.

Please help us to make education at KSE accessible to students from all over Ukraine!

You can read students’ stories and support them on the page of the project – “Talents from regions”.