Potential of Indirect Financing of Higher Education Institutions in Terms of Global Economic Development

The expansion of higher education is both necessary and desirable. But it is costly, and faces competing imperatives for public spending. Higher education finance is therefore a matter of discussions of academics, financial experts and politicians. This contribution aims to analyze one issue which seems to be very prospective for higher education institutions in the Czech Republic - tuition fees paid by foreign students. Fees give universities more resources to improve quality and, through competition, help improve the efficiency of higher education which those resources are used for. Furthermore, indirect financing becomes very important issue in a newly intended model of higher institutions funding. In order to outline the potential of foreign students a large international research was carried out to find out the incentives, barriers, preferences and other possible influences for foreign students to come to study in the Czech Republic (in terms of their self-funding). The research addressed more than thousand students in six countries. The main goal of the above mentioned research on foreign students' willingness to study in the Czech Republic on the self funding principle (or significant tuition fee) was to identify and classify the types of such people and to outline their main characteristics important for future effective contribution to indirect financing. For that purpose different methods of classification were chosen. Two of the algorithms for classification trees - CART and CHAID were used for its evaluation from the group of supervised learning methods. Research results are given both in theoretical and practical areas. The potential financial contribution of foreign students is also demonstrated.