This paper studies the basic principles of the Russian research university, its scientific, educational, social and cultural environment with the aim to study the transformation of the classical Humboldt’s model of university. The author emphasizes the role of the university environment as a key factor of shaping the personality of a research university graduate. There is discussed the importance of scientific and pedagogical schools and their leaders in the university’s development and functioning. The innovation activity is defined, and it is proposed to consider the innovative university system as a new essence of its structure. The turn of the XX century is characterized by the significant role of university traditions and of the Ministers of Education and Science in keeping and developing Russian higher education. The article is addressed to the heads of higher education institutions, to the experts in the sphere of university management, as well as to the researchers in the sphere of education and science. 

This research article studies the problem of inconsistency of higher-educated personnel training structure to the current and future sectoral specialization of the Russian economy. One of the key tasks of the higher education system in any country is to train personnel who would be demanded by economy in the future. The responsibility for balancing the structure of training higher-educated personnel with the needs of organizations and various industries lies both on the government authorities and on the universities themselves. The authors analyze the correspondence of the structure of training personnel with higher education to the current and future needs of the socio-economic development of Russia in general and its regions in particular. In the course of the study, the structure of training personnel with higher education by enlarged groups of specialties and training programs has been compared with the current and prospective structure of the gross regional product, as well as with the distribution of the employed by sectors of the economy of all Russian Federation constituent entities. The results of the analysis by federal districts are based on the data obtained for the constituent entities, and make it possible to assess the imbalance in the structure of training personnel with higher education, to formulate possible reasons for the existing imbalances at the regional, federal, and universities’ levels. The study is based on the documents of the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia concerning the distribution of admission control figures by the Russian Federation entities and enlarged groups of specialties and training programs, aswell as on the information from the Federal State Statistics Service. For most regions of Russia, the results of the analysis revealed the problem of inconsistency between higher-educated personnel training structure and the structure of the need for personnel as determined by the goals and objectives of socio-economic development. A possible way to solve this problem is to revise the universities’ development programs with due consideration of the long-term regional development prospects supported by a system of institutional measures on the part of education authorities, industries, and regions.

The authors of this article are carrying out the analysis of the students’ training programs congruence to the sectoral structure of employment in 84 Russian regions using the sectoral model concept and the index of structural differences. The paper presents a methodological approach to assessing the congruence of training programs with the needs of the regional labor market in Russia. The level of regional higher education systems differentiation, the sectoral structure of graduates, and the level of their employment in the regional context were determined applying economic and statistical methods. The ratio of the graduates’ supply to their demand analyzed, there is presented a classification of regions according to the levels of this ration, conclusions drawn on the balance of higher education systems in the regions, taking into account the needs for training. A structural and professional disproportion between regional labor markets and regional systems of higher education in most regions of Russia is diagnosed, as well as a number of imbalances concerning specialists’ training in the secondary sector of the economy, which is decisive for the development of high-tech in dustries and provides the need for personnel within the new digital economy. The directions for overcoming dysfunction of the relationship between universities and the labor market are identified. The results of the study make it possible to make decisions on improving the policy of distributing the planned contingent of students by training programs in accordance with the needs of regional economies.

The article introduces the concept of the New Town Campus as a part of the Network University of the World Class Research and Academic Center «Kuzbass». The research objective is to assess the role of the Campus within the Network University project aimed at improving the efficiency of the local education and managing its resources. The research features the infrastructure solutions for the future New Town Campus and involves the methods of conceptual proposals, functional zoning of urban environment, and urban planning. The New Town as an open, comfortable, and encouraging platform will ensure the world-class development of the business-tourism cluster, eventually turning the Network University into a platform able to compete with global leaders in education, research, and production. The Campus will also create opportunities for the modern intellectual and healthy lifestyle while optimizing the use of territorial resources.

The article discusses the problem of within-the-education-process fostering digital skills among university students of various training programs. The specific skills (relevant to a particular sphere) are differentiated from the general ones (digital skills formed beyond the IT industry). The authors suggest that all training programs contain a «pillow» of general digital skills, which can be fixed both de jure – in the methodological and regulatory bases of the educational process, and de facto – in teaching practices. The study identifies a framework for general and specific digital skills. To test the hypotheses, two groups of data are analyzed: the normative and methodological bases of educational programs (fostering skills de jure) and students’ questionnaire answers on how the practices of developing and using digital skills in their studies are integrated (fostering skills de facto). The research is carried out in seven programs with obviously wide differences – from medicine to information technology and philology. The research has shown that digital skills are de jure represented in all programs, but normative consolidation is more typical for general skills, not for specific digital ones. There is identified a gap between de jure and de facto fostering digital skills, and this gap is various for different programs. The research results can be used in universities when designing strategies to form digital skills or when modifying such skills-related methodological bases of training programs.

In the context of the COVID pandemic, there has dramatically increased the significance of distance learning technologies. Higher education will most probably increase their usage even after overcoming the coronavirus. This paper aims at assessing Russian university students’ readiness to exercise distance learning technologies. The survey within Rostov-on-Don universities provided data on 428 students’ skills in using Internet technologies when studying. It is shown that in the pre-pandemic period, no more than a quarter of students had the necessary skills to participate in video conferences, and about 16 % of students took online courses autonomously. Only 6,5 % of the respondents could manage both technologies that comprise distance learning. The results obtained on the relationship between academic performance and self-participation in online courses, as well as on the relationship of these indicators with general digital literacy and immersion in social networks, should be taken into account within wide computerization of education during the pandemic.

Regular surveys of doctoral students on their career trajectories, satisfaction with the program and the learning process, with the organization of supervision, etc. are widespread in leading foreign universities. The results of such surveys are used to improve programs and assess the effect of the introduced measures. In Russia, however, there is a lack of empirical data on the doctoral students’ experience, which makes it impossible to identify and address the reasons for the low performance of the Russian doctoral education observed over the past few years. To support the discussion about the need for such monitoring surveys in Russia, this article presents the results of an analysis of open information from the websites of about 150 foreign institutions that organize doctoral student surveys at the national, cross-university, and institutional levels. The presented review shows how actively doctoral education data collection takes place in the USA, Canada, Australia, and the UK, where there are one or more large-scale projects stimulating the collection of data from several universities, and how the results of such research are used by universities, employers, and applicants. On the example of topics related to the motivation for entering doctoral programs, to the career trajectories of doctoral students, and to the organization of supervision, it is discussed how the described research practices can be used for the evidence-based development of Russian doctoral education.

The paper considers individual academic productivity and the new managerialism in academic research as a set of social relations, common and opposite interests of a scholar and a university. The balance of interests is a necessary condition for regulating the contradictions among participants in public relations, including academic research. Reforming higher education results in new managerialism spreading wider and in scientific results paid attention to. The increasing accountability with a lack of mutual trust and information asymmetry creates the illusion of an imbalance of academic researchers’ interests in favor of management. The power potential of the new managerialism can become an instrument of both pressure and encouragement of individual academic productivity. As is shown in our review, this productivity, mainly published papers, is influenced by the principles of its assessment. The evolution of approaches to the academic results promotion provides a large variety of criteria for the selection of indicators to assess scientific activity. The game theory allows to reduce this variety to one common ground, where winning is considered to be the basis of relationships in academic research. As a result, there is a matrix model of four strategies – the extreme forms of scholar-and-management relationship manifestation within the system of academic research. Only one of these strategies means a balance of interests and long-term cooperation, the other three imply the contradiction of individual academic productivity vs the new managerialism and are short-term. The use of winning in a game as a basis and criterion of assessment for the individual academic productivity normalization contributes to opportunistic behavior neutralization. The author makes the conclusion that the type of strategy affects the combination of simple and qualitative indicators and professional expertise when assessing scientific results. It is reasonable to choose the indicators of assessment according to the most balanced strategy of regulating the contradictions among participants in academic research.

This research paper studies trends and hotspots of management internationalization in the sphere of higher education. The survey is based on CiteSpace visualization technology and on the corpus approach to studying keywords and annotations for 2010–2021 publications in 25 major higher education journals. Keywords analysis by CiteSpace showed that the hotspots of the management internationalization research are focused on postgraduate education management, on the projects «Double First Class University Plan», «Greater Bay Area», «Cooperation in Running Schools», etc. The future possible areas of investigation are the «local internationalization» of university management, the internationa lization of management in terms of international-level specialties and first-class universities’ nationalization, as well as the contradiction of the «spillover effect» between university management and cross-university cooperation. The corpus-based analysis showed that over the past 12 years the studies of internationalization of higher education and its mana gement have been carried out within the large-scale project «One Belt – One Road» and economic globalization. These studies include the modules of universities’ development, university education, academic research, school management strategy, etc. To effectively address the challenges faced by higher education internationalization management, the aut hors propose to take advantage of consistent teaching quality and to leverage regional and local resources, so as to create a multidimensional platform that would interconnect talents and ways to use them. Of no less importance, when summarizing such experience, is it to take into account the historical background, so that this platform, certainly engaging state policy, would allow a reform of higher education globalization for its further development.

This research article aims at identifying the impact of establishing flagship universities on the dynamics and structure of their income. The study is based on analyzing the growth rate of total income and income per 1 scientific and pedagogical worker in 2019–2020 as compared to 2015 reference year (taking inflation into account), together with finding out changes in the share of off-budget revenues, revenues from research and development work. There are used standard techniques of descriptive statistics, paired Student’s t-test for related samples, Mann-Whitney U-test, and cluster analysis. The total income of all flagship universities has grown, but, however, show deeper differentiation. The group of leaders have increased their revenues by 0,5–1,0 billion rubles in 2015 prices, but a number of universities face stagnated or declining income. The COVID-19 pandemic has had little or no impact on income differentiation and dyna mics. The by-income stratification per 1 scientific and pedagogical worker is lower, which indicates a personnel decrease in a number of clusters with stable or declining income. Neither institution’s joining the first or the second wave of flagship universities nor the availability of special federal funding has a statistically significant relationship with income dynamics. At the same time, the majority of flagship universities get the same stable share of income from research activities and did not decrease their dependence on the budget system. This indicates either the absence of major chan gesor the simultaneous growth of income from research activities and additional funding like federal programs, projects, grants. Not all flagship universities have been able to increase revenues, so the leaders’ experience requires further analysis. The results of the study may possibly be of interest for managers of both flagship and other categories of universities, as well as for those who are going to substantiate management decisions within the latest Priority-2030 program.

The article analyzes the case of creating a project for Ulyanovsk State Pedagogical University development. This process resulted in the adoption of a university development program until 2024. The authors provide the alternatives and the reasons for choosing the strategic type of planning the development, the type of strategic orientation of the university (market, entrepreneurial and educational orientation), and the type of its reorganization (restructuring and reconfiguration). The paper indicates the reasons and the criteria for the experts’ selection and their role in its creation. There are presented the results of the analysis of all project development stages, the work of focus groups with the main stake holders, the group work on the blocks of the program and the sessions devoted to the road maps. This case can be useful to those who are starting this kind of activity for the first time, since the authors describe the progress of work and consider its timing, as well as the difficulties encountered. The article also explains why this or that decision was made, indicates the right decisions, reveals the errors and the lessons learned.