Labor market trends estimation shows that there is an increasing number of professions in which universal competencies are valued, including critical thinking. This paper presents a theoretical framework, which makes it possible to assess the organizational and pedagogical conditions for the development of critical thinking, and analyzes these conditions in Russian universities. To collect data, we used the method of semi-structured interviews with teachers (18 people), with representatives of the administration (10 people) of Russian universities, and with one of the authors of Federal State Standards for Higher Education (current version). The results show that today in Russia, despite the requirements of the standards, not all universities have conditions for the development of critical thinking among all students. Three types of universities can be distinguished: 1) universities that create conditions for the development of critical thinking among all students; 2) universities whose conditions allow to develop critical thinking only for individual students; 3) universities that do not create conditions for the development of students’ critical thinking at all.

The paper reviews best educational practices in engineering training provided by world leading universities. Modern landscape of engineering training and education has been viewed; expectations and needs of different stakeholders of educational process have been considered, including those of industry representatives. The main purpose of our research is to study the educational practices of the world leading universities in engineering training, to analyze educational policies and training measures supporting their realisation. There are considered the innovations in educational policies of the universities whose experience in engineering training is determined by new objectives of reforming degree programmes via integrating new technologies of active, project-based, and problem-based learning in order to develop students’ key professional competences and generic skills. The examples of curriculum planning in collaboration with employers are viewed. The university staff training integrated into real industry operating is considered. The authors’ conclusions on the changes in the current state of engineering training are presented in the form of advice, with the orientation towards prospective piloting and integration of the best practices into engineering education in Russian universities.

Increasing the effectiveness of postgraduate programs is now becoming one of the most important issues in ensuring the economic development of the state. As a rule, Russian postgraduate students, who are aimed at getting an academic degree, fail to defend their theses during their postgraduate studies, and they need additional time to complete their work. The purpose of this research article is to identify and analyze the key problems faced by Russian postgraduates seeking to submit their dissertations for defense. Our investigation comes to be original in two aspects. First, in contrast to other empirical studies of postgraduate school, the authors’ attention is focused on the barriers to attaining a degree, which arise not in the course of study, but after graduation. Second, the analysis is based on interviewing those graduates who have successfully overcome these barriers and defended their PhD theses. The empirical base of the study is online questionnaire surveys of Russian PhDs (Candidates of Science) who have recently completed their postgraduate studies, as well as administrative and managerial workers responsible for postgraduate students’ training and certification. The quantitative data obtained indicate that the presence or absence of a dissertation council in an organization wherein postgraduate students are trained is one of the key factors determining the pace and effectiveness of the postgraduates’ proceeding to an academic degree. In general, the results of the study make it possible to conclude that the difficulties at the final stage of preparing a dissertation are largely due to the imperfection of the mechanism for pairing the systems of state scientific certification and scientific and pedagogical personnel postgraduate training. Thus, we discuss possible organizational and managerial decisions of how to bring these systems closer and improve the performance of postgraduate studies. This paper might be of interest for higher education researchers, as well as for scientific, pedagogical and administrative workers involved in the management of personnel training and higher scientific qualifications certification.

The article presents a systematic review of theoretical and methodological approaches to the conceptualization and empirical study of doctoral students’ supervision. Three approaches (mentoring, doctoral student-centered, and environmental) are distinguished depending on the main responsibility for the result. The mentoring approach attributes the responsibility for the result to the supervisor. This approach is generally associated with the so-called «apprentice model», which understands the doctoral student as a «neophyte» introduced to the academic world by the supervisor. The doctoral student-centered approach is characterized by imposing the responsibility mainly on the doctoral student. This approach assumes a more active role of the doctoral student and goes back to the models of student-centered pedagogy. The environmental approach focuses on studying the role of the environment and on the issues related to the academic and social integration of doctoral students. All these approaches notably have a number of limitations due to their concentration on certain factors of the educational process and less attention to the dynamic and relative nature of various aspects of academic supervision and its relationship with the effectiveness of doctoral training. There is substantiated the importance of developing a relational approach, which would synthesize the key points of the three approaches considered, and assume a distributed model of responsibility within the academic supervision. As it understands «learning alliances» more broadly than pairs or teams of scientific supervisors and graduate students, this approach focuses not only on the activity of individual actors, but also on the system of relationships between them.

The article overviews the existing models of technology transfer, including those within foreign universities, and highlights the most relevant ones that can be used by Russian universities in the post-COVID-19 conditions. The study should allow the university-based transfer centers to choose the model which is mostly suitable for their situation, and to include elements that will help them to maximize the efficiency of their activities. The existing centers will be able to make changes in their activity in order to update and/or to transform it in accordance with the changed conditions. For the management personnel of the university, the article also provides practical recommendations on managing technology transfer centers. The authors reveal the key functioning elements of various technology transfer models, which can be used by management personnel to design technology transfer centers based on Russian universities. The possible result of the stakeholders’ getting to know this study might be their creating and implementing regulations to govern the technology transfer centers’ activities; forming a personnel reserve; advanced existing personnel training and multi-competence teams’ creating; forming a flexible budgetary policy, as well as a policy of values, for the technology transfer center to function within.

Today universities become drivers of technology and business development all over the world. Besides fulfilling traditional tasks of creating new knowledge and competence, higher education institutions play a significant role in developing innovative ecosystems and entrepreneurship. In Russia, however, the interaction of universities and business is forming not as quickly as in developed economies. This article uses qualitative interviews and case analysis to identify and discuss the barriers to effective university-enterprise interaction in Russia. The research is based on expert interviews with representatives of universities and businesses, as well as on the case study of PJSC «LUKOIL» and HEIs interaction. The study showed that the development of university-enterprise interaction meets several barriers rooted in the mismatch of both sides’ expectations of each other. The results of the research also show promising directions for university-business cooperation in Russia.

The article (a case) highlights the experience of the regional university in staff optimization caused by the requirements of federal legislation to improve the quality of higher education and to outline the personnel strategy prospects for the future.
The methodological basis of the study is the systematic approach, which made it possible to comprehensively assess the qualitative changes in the university staff; the use of the method of situational analysis largely contributed to an increase in the objectivity of the results obtained. Besides, the researchers used the following methods: the study of legislative documents that determine the activities of a higher educational institution; the analysis of theoretical papers on the management of educational institutions and on human resource management; the method of mathematical modelling and the analysis of statistical data, the method of social forecasting.
The study comes to be theoretically significant, as it clarifies the concept of «staff optimization» and introduces the concept of «university staff optimization» as a new scientific term. The research also distinguishes the basic principles of university staff optimization and substantiates the reasons that caused this process, mainly related to the demographic, social and economic situation in our country and the tasks of reforming the higher education system. The article also examines the concept of «university personnel strategy» and highlights its components, focused on preserving academic traditions, on creating conditions for increasing the staff competency and on encouraging the faculty to intensify their activity. On the example of the regional university, there is carried out an analysis of quantitative and qualitative changes in the educational process staffing (in terms of academic degrees and titles, faculty compliance with the profile of the disciplines taught, etc.); the effectiveness of a number of new mechanisms introduced into the universities’ practice in order to update the requirements for the selection of candidates for teaching positions is studied. Thus appearing to be scientifically significant, the paper presents a regional university staff optimization model, which includes several logically related stages, allowing this process to be carried out most effectively: scientific, normative, practical and social. The recommendations to improve the personnel strategy and systematically enhance the quality of personnel in the educational process are formulated.
The work is original, as it shows the systemic nature of work with the faculty when optimizing the staff in accordance with the university’s personnel strategy. The article might be of use for university leaders and researchers working on personnel issues and personnel management.

The article states the stratification of the university’s corporate culture as its traditional cultural base into the institutional and administrative (realizing the «third mission» of the university and bearing the tendency of its transformation into a business corporation) and the culture of the teaching staff (which has preserved the traditional university functions) and culture. There are suggested ways to eliminate this mismatch.
The authors substantiate the role and significance of the ideological attitude of the university’s corporate culture to trust as a «glue» of its stratified cultural base, which maintains a balance between the traditional and modern university’s mission (the concept of «glue» is suggested by the Russian researcher L. Gudkov, who uses this term to denote a mechanism holding society together into a unity and a whole).
The methodology of conceptual reasoning is based on a sociocultural approach that suggests considering changes of any social institution in the context of responding to the challenge of the globalized world of network structures and market relations.
The article identifies the causes and consequences of lacking coordination in the cultural base of the university.
Communicative rationality, which, as a style of scientific and philosophical thinking, initiates the construction of modern social ontologies, is proven to be a possible complementarity instrument («glue») of the two university cultures. It is argued that today trust reveals its not only psychological, but also ontological and epistemological significance, orienting both components of corporate culture towards their unity in implementing of the university’s research and educational missions together with its «third mission».
The article originally defines the university’s corporate culture as focused on the formation of students’ trust as a key factor of sparing life in the modern world with its ideological, economic, and political tensions. On this basis, it is proposed to form a university management strategy and to restructure the educational process.

This conceptual article aims at analyzing the impact of political and economic actions taken by states during the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic on their academic attractiveness for international students. The resulting crisis conditions demanded to make a lot of decisions in a very short time, thus speeding up the dynamic of the situation development and allowing to more accurately trace necessary interconnections over a short observation period.
The authors focus their attention on English-speaking countries, which traditionally attract large numbers of international students: Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the USA. The research is based on the analysis of secondary empirical data obtained from foreign sources, as well as on official statistics. The short-term impact of political and economic decisions, made by heads of states and responsible institutions, on countries’ academic attractiveness and their perception by international students is assessed via critical and reflective analysis of surveys and researches, as well as via available data on international students’ enrollment in 2020/2021 academic year.
The authors found a correlation between the decisions taken by the countries during Spring – Summer 2020 and the subsequent transformation of their academic attractiveness under the increasing competition between countries and the students’ choice of the best opportunities for their future career and life. The authors assessed the following factors affecting the attractiveness of a state as a studying destination: economic support measures taken by the governments of the considered countries during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, new adjustments in visa rules for foreign students and related regulatory changes, as well as the most significant public statements by officials. The research topic can be further expanded and supplemented through data actualization, including additional factors into the analysis and expanding the time period of the study. The findings and recommendations given in the conclusion of the article can be practically applied when developing state education export strategies or universities’ and educational agencies’ recruiting approaches.

This conceptual article presents microeconomic approaches to analyzing the shifts in universities’ expenses and the saving effects of the scale and scope of HEI’s activities. The authors provide an overview of econometric studies which assess the effects considered for universities in some countries. As a result, there comes to be questioned the economic feasibility of consolidating and expanding the universities’ activities, the reasonability of combining research with educational activities. The discussion concerns the transformation of the universities’ economy in the context of education digitalization, the prospects of the «economy of scale» and the «economy of scope» to be compared. The conclusions are drawn on the possible benefit for large universities, on its consequences for competition in higher education, and on the partnership benefits for all market players.