EDUCATIONAL CENTERS AND REGIONS OF TRAINING OF PROFESSIONAL GEOGRAPHERS IN UKRAINE: SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL TRENDS

Abstract

The education of specialists in geography in Ukrainian higher education institutions has a 200-year history of development. Such education existed within various specialties at different times. The current list of fields of knowledge and specialties, after being updated in 2017, includes specialty 106 Geography. The publication provides an analysis of the contingent of higher education students of the first (bachelor’s) degree of higher education for 2018–2023 according to the Unified State Database on Education. The analysis was carried out on the scale of both the education center and the regions of Ukraine and socio-geographical regions. As of 2023, the training of specialists in this specialty at the bachelor's degree of higher education is carried out in 17 higher education institutions located in 14 regions and the city of Kyiv. The largest education centers in terms of the number of applicants (about 50% of the total number of applicants) are the universities of Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Lviv. However, at the macro-regional level, the Carpathian socio-geographical region is the leader in terms of the number of students. Moreover, it is the only one where all the oblasts that make up the region haveIt has been established that the general feature of the location of higher education institutions that train specialists in the specialty 106 Geography is the trend of “1 region – 1 higher education institution”. The only exceptions are Chernihiv and Zakarpattia regions, where there are two relevant higher education institutions. The coefficient of territorial concentration of higher education students by region varies from 0.23 to 3.32. In more than 40% (7 out of 17 higher education institutions), the level of concentration of applicants is more than 1. This indicates an almost even distribution of applicants for the specialty 106 Geography. It has been determined that degree programs, the name of which reflects the focus of the educational program, are more popular than programs that contain only the name of the specialty 

educational programs in the specialty 106 Geography.