The Factors of Competitiveness of the Higher Education Institutions of Ukraine

The article is concerned with studying the factors of external and internal environment that ensure the competitiveness of higher education institution (HEI). It is proved that the competitiveness of HEI is expedient to consider as an innovation-active activity, which acts as a critical condition for the long-term and sustainable economic development of education in the modern global knowledge economy. The article is aimed at identifying the competitiveness factors of the HEI of Ukraine as the basis for the formation and further development of an innovation-active university in the current conditions of transformation of the national higher education system. The carried out systematic and morphological analysis allowed to group the factors by the degree of influence on the competitiveness of HEI (client-orientedness; source of financial resources; innovation and investment potential; strategic management; rationing of labor; internationalization; monitoring; informatization; quality of training of applicants) and to build a graph of the relationship between these factors. An hierarchy of the university’s competitiveness factors is proposed, which allows to combine goals and objectives directed towards forecasting, improving, solving, modeling, analyzing educational processes. This, in turn, will act as an instrument for comprehensive assessment of the level of competitiveness of an HEI. The carried out analysis and application of the problem-oriented approach allowed to define five levels at which the mutually conditioned hierarchical influence between factors was determined, which would be the basis for the formation of conceptual measures directed towards increasing the competitiveness of HEI.