The problems of budget funding of higher education institutions: analysis and improvement

The main problem of financing higher education institutions is the lack of public funds allocated from the budget. At this stage of the development of budgetary financing for universities, we see a gradual finance withdrawals happening on the basis of estimates, and the transition to “efficient” financing. Such financing has its supporters and opponents. The main argument “for” performance-oriented budgeting is that this method of obtaining funds stimulates more rational use of them. The arguments “against” such financing are also important: such budgeting leads to “work for the indicator” without a significant impact to the internal forces of the university, and the indicators on the basis of which the university finances, in no way make it possible to assess the real quality of the work. For example, the indicator of the number of trained specialists does not reflect the real quality of education in the university. Immediate results of the activities of higher education institutions are the provision of educational or other services of a certain quality or volume. There are several mechanisms that allow to evaluate the effectiveness of the university’s activities used abroad. The authors of this article propose to evaluate the effectiveness of the university in the context of several areas of its activities: education, innovation and scientific research. On the basis of received indicators the higher education institutions will be distributed by “groups”, on which the final amount of funding depends. Such system of financing and the developed formulas for calculation of financial assets volumes are approbated on the example of the Samara National Research University, that allowed to identify the advantages and disadvantages of the presented calculation method.