HIGHER EDUCATION OF THE USA AND UKRAINE: DISTINCT AND COMMON FEATURES

In the article the education systems of the United States and Ukraine are being compared and the peculiarities of their functioning, types of higher educational establishments, curriculum content, funding of the educational establishments and students are being reviewed. The distinct feature is the high level of decentralization of American higher education, while Ukrainian one has highly centralized management. The following distinctive feature is different types of higher educational institutions in the countries reviewed. In Ukraine today there are following: university (conventional and specialized, technical, technological, economic, educational, medical, agricultural, etc.), academy, institute, conservatory, college, technical school. The most common US higher education institutions are universities, colleges and specialized institutes. The traditional forms of learning in Ukraine are day-time, evening and extramural ones, while less popular and still undeveloped is distance learning. On the contrary distance learning is the most popular form of education in the US, which is characterized by low cost and at the same time accessibility and convenient educational environment, professional orientation of the subjects, their general value and so on. Today the other forms of training are implemented in the USA such as “university without walls”, “experience based learning”, cooperative education and others. One aspect of state regulation in of high school is its funding. In Ukraine, as defined by the Law of Ukraine “On Higher Education”, the funding of higher educational institutions of state ownership is at the expense of the state budget and higher educational institutions of private property are at the expense of their owners. The financing of the US higher education is carried out by the federal government (financial assistance to students through grants, long-term loans for the training, programs of work during training, grants for research and development) and the authority of the states (for public universities - through direct funding research grants and financial assistance to students, for private schools - only through financial assistance to students, research grants). The common feature is the use of credit units in the education system of both of the countries, as well as within the national education reform, school graduates are examined in the form of multiple choice tests like the American academic ability test (SAT) or the test for admission to American universities (ACT). The results of these tests are used as criteria for admission to universities and to identify the sources of students learning funding.