Abstract
Financing of tertiary education follows other reform processes in this sector of education. The financial crisis has only accelerated rethinking the limits of funding the large expansion of tertiary education, when already stretched tertiary budgets have in many cases come under further pressure of reduced public budgets.
Financing influences the environment where institutions should function so as to meet social as well as personal requirements. The expansion has opened access to tertiary education for a much larger part of population while substantially diversifying the range of educational institutions and bringing the quality of education provided to the fore.
One of crucial aspects of funding is assessing its effectiveness which implies a mass transition to performance-based funding. Examples of selected countries show how different systems of tertiary education have been reformed, what aims and objectives they follow and how different can be funding mechanisms chosen to achieve them.
The differences in teachers' pay are surprisingly large between the countries. In some cases we can certainly consider the remuneration to be a risk factor, both for the development of individual institutions and the whole tertiary education, because teachers are crucial for quality education and for the target behaviour of tertiary institutions.
Other examples show how the quality-based funding also usually aims at the profiling of institutions, their outcomes being specified in a structured way according to their character. This is closely related to the position of research in the institution and the support of its excellence.
The last topic is how programmes promoting internationalisation and mobility affect the whole funding environment Erasmus+ not only supports the mobility, but, for example, allows students to draw loans for their master's degree abroad.