How are European HEIs funded

How are European HEIs funded?

The figure below plots individual HEIs by the share of third-party funds and tuition fees.The remaining revenues are mostly accounted by the general state contribution, e.g an HEI with 20% tuition fees and 20% third-party funds will be funded to 60% by basic state instalment.
These data display clear patterns in terms of resource structure. Public HEIs are mostly funded through the general state contribution, with the exception of UK and Ireland. There are only 109 public HEIs in ETER that are mostly funded by tuition fees, 93 of them in the UK. On the contrary, private HEIs are mostly funded through students’ contribution. Third-party funds, which are largely composed by research contracts of public funding agencies, account for up to one-third of the total revenues of research universities, but are much less important for colleges and private HEIs.

Variables and data availability
ETER provides data on total current revenues, excluding non-recurring revenues such as large capital investments. Revenues are divided in three broad streams – i.e. the core budget of the university (mostly composed by the basic state contribution), third party funds (mostly research contracts, particularly from public funding agencies) and student fees – a more fine-grained distinction is available within these categories, but availability is lower.
Data on total revenues are available for 1,313 HEIs over 2,767 in the 2014 edition of the ETER database. The availability of the breakdowns is slightly lower. For 12 countries data are available for most HEIs (including Germany and UK), for 6 countries only for universities (including France, Italy and Poland); finally, data are completely missing for 15 countries that include most Central and Easter European countries. In the new edition of ETER that will be published in summer 2018, a thorough revision of financial data is envisaged to improve comparability and availability.

ETER is a European Commission initiative implemented by a consortium of five partners, which aims at providing data on Higher Education Institutions in Europe. It is an Erasmus+ project fully financed by the European Commission. The opinions expressed in this message are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission.
https://www.eter-project.com