Abstract

In the bibliographic article, we analyze the financing model of state higher education in Costa Rica. As a result, not only from the difficult economical situation, in wich most of the world countries have been going through but also a higher demand for a higher education in the last years, there have been developed several models for giving economical support to the higher public state education. In the particular case of Costa Rica, some years ago, the state has bet for a higher participation in the economical support to the education in all its levels. In this context, this article pretends to analyze the model for an economical support to the current higher public state education in Costa Rica in general and particularly at the University of Costa Rica. The developed study has a descriptive character; for this purpose it has been done a research in terms of quantitative, qualitative and normative data, which allows to make a recount of the development of the current economical support model and the main characteristics of it. On this matter, there are not enough publications about it, so this study fills the gap by systematizing the dispersed information for the analysis of a high importance subject in terms of the Costa Rican public policies. In this way, the double reform of the article 78 of the Political Constitution in 1997 and 2011, which forces the state to take action in the education, beginning with a 6% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and then with an 8% of that indicator, they have allowed the budget of the Costa Rican state universities to increase considerably and continuously from a 0,80% of the GDP in 1999 to a 1,42% in 2017.

Key words: higher education; educational finance; University of Costa Rica