Analysis of the higher education institutions network and the problem of its financing

The problem of the quality of specialists training and the issue of financing the training of higher education seekers in Ukraine at the expense of budget funds and the funds of individuals and legal entities are examined. The purpose of the study is to identify ways to increase the efficiency of the use of budget funds to finance the training of students while ensuring the proper quality of this process. During the research, the Data Science toolkit has been used to work with large arrays of Big Data information. In combination with the application of a set of empirical methods, the research enables to put forward a hypothesis about the existence of an irrational distribution of budget funds among higher education institutions (HEIs) to finance the training of students in certain specialties. The article reviews the dynamics of the development of the network of HEIs of Ukraine during the period of independence of state-owned, communal and private forms of ownership and departmental subordination. A comparative analysis of the network structure in relation to the number of higher education seekers has been carried out in comparison with the corresponding structure of the network of educational institutions in European countries and in the USA, which confirms the relevance of the optimization of the network of HEIs and its structure. The presence of artificially created HEIs, which are subordinate to individual ministries and state services with privileged operating conditions, gradually reduces the quality of training in the absence of internal competition, which leads to a gradual decrease in the efficiency of the use of budget funding. The work quantitatively substantiates the state’s financial losses from the irrational distribution of the state order among HEIs for the training of specialists with higher education. HEIs with a high proportion of incomplete groups, that are unable to ensure high quality of specialist training, are unable to attract external sources of funding for specialist training as a result of non-competitiveness in the market of educational services, are only spending budget funds without proper results. According to the research results, generalized optimization criteria of the network of HEIs of Ukraine are proposed, which can be used by the governmental bodies of Ukraine