Introduction. Education is one of the determinants of the economic growth in any state, education funding representing thus a very important aspect in public policies.
Aim of the study. In this article we present the general principles of funding higher education in Romania and how it evolved over the last decade, stressing that the public higher education has been consistently underfunded. We also present an overview of the evolution of the main statistical indicators that characterize higher education in Romania, the number of universities and faculties, the number of students, number of teachers, revealing discrepancies between their evolution and the evolution of funding. We compared the funding of higher education in Romania and EU countries highlighting the fact that Romania should pay a special attention to higher education to achieve the performance of other EU member countries.
Keywords: higher education, education statistics, education funding
JEL Classification: I21, I22, I23
