Higher education spatial planning in the geographical area of the country

Universities have been considered by city planners as one of the most important location-based institutions. There is consensus created that to achieve regional balance and rational use of the features and capabilities of the region, it is necessary to focus on how to deploy and congest higher education in the region. There should be a special efforts made in revising the content of educational programs and making them practically appropriate for regional potentials. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of higher education in the development of the country's provinces by using Maurice's factor analysis and development coefficient models to evaluate the performance of universities and higher education centers in the economic development of the country's 31 provinces.The results showed that with the increasing number of higher education institutions, regional access to the urban, socio-economic and cultural infrastructure had increased. But, due to lack of country wide spatial planning, particularly in the higher education system, university functions is isolated from socio-economic activities of regions and could not play an important role in providing human resource specialists working in various economic sectors specifically for agriculture.