INDICATIVE COST OF EDUCATIONAL SERVICES AS A WAY TO OPTIMIZE UKRAINIAN HIGHER EDUCATION
INDICATIVE COST OF EDUCATIONAL SERVICES AS A WAY TO OPTIMIZE UKRAINIAN HIGHER EDUCATION

Summary/Abstract: The paper considers the impact of the indicative cost of education (the minimum amount of tuition fees on the contractual basis (contract) at the expense of individuals/legal entities) in state higher education institutions on the Ukrainian market of educational services. It demonstrates that the introduction of the indicative cost of higher education by the state institutions of higher education was accessible through the application of the dumping strategy – by using the budget funds to educate feepaying students. Under such conditions, the share of private higher education was not more than 10 percent of the total number of fee-paying students. The present paper aims to assess the impact of the introduction of the indicative cost of education on the relationship between private and public higher education, and the shift of the equilibrium cost of education. It is determined that this indicator is calculated according to a simplified algorithm individually for each state higher education institution and does not fully consider all the actual costs of the educational process. At the same time, such an implementation does not allow public institutions to use the dumping strategy and over time will change the ratio of quantitative indicators of private and public higher education in Ukraine. The sample flowchart displaying the supply and demand for the speciality “Economics” illustrates how the ratio of students studying on a contractual basis in private and state higher education institutions will change at different ratios of the indicative cost and the equilibrium cost of education in the speciality “Economics” according to the 2019 data. It was concluded that, in general, the introduction of the indicative cost of education would subsequently lead to significant changes in the ratio of private and public higher education institutions, their student population under contract (fee-paying students) where the main factors will be the customer’s fiscal capacity and the income, they provide. As a result, there will be a shift of the equilibrium point for most in-demand specialities in the direction of increasing the cost of training and reducing the volume of final contracts between the applicants and higher educational institutions.

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