Towards Fair Setting of Coefficients of Economic Difficulty: The Case of Interdisciplinary Study Fields

The normative part represents the most important section of the funding scheme for educational activity of higher education institutions in the Czech Republic. The normative part depends particularly on the number of students and the values of the coefficients of economic difficulty that are assigned to the individual study programmes. This paper analyses similarity of the study fields that belong to study programmes with different coefficients of economic difficulty. Firstly, we compute the coefficient of similarity based on the share of the same subjects in both study fields. Secondly, we compare the economic diffi culty of the rest of the subjects using an expert estimate. Having thoroughly confronted subjects from selected study fields, we conclude that one can find some interdisciplinary study fields which are very similar, but have different values of the coefficient of economic difficulty. To improve the fairness of the funding scheme, the coeffi cients of economic difficulty should be changed.