This article presents the comprehensive study results of the performance of universities which are the winners of the “Leadership in the region and/or industry” track of the “Priority 2030” program. The research included a comparison of the results of 3 groups of universities of this track, determined by the results of the competition. The participation of these groups of universities in the main strategic initiatives in the field of the higher education system development in 2006–2020 is considered; indicators for the main areas of university activities were selected and grouped, namely, educational, scientific and innovation, international and financial. The comparative analysis of aggregate indicators of recent years is based on the Displaced Ideal Method. This made it possible not only to determine the current positions of universities belonging to the examined track, but also to identify a number of problems in their activities that need to be solved in the coming years to strengthen their contribution to the socio-economic development of the regions. The results of the comprehensive analysis can be used not only by the current participants of the “Leadership in the region and/or industry” track of the “Priority 2030” program, but also by universities that only plan to take part in this program in the near future and the expert community engaged in research in the field of higher education development in Russia.

The article presents the results of a study of the features of interaction between students and their parents as a factor of minimizing the educational risks. These features are analyzed through the prism of the functions of their interaction, such as economic, emotional, parental control. The empirical basis of the article comprises the data of sociological surveys conducted in the Sverdlovsk region in 2018 and 2021. The methodical strategy was based on a combination of quantitative (mass survey of students (n=953) and parents (n=452)) and qualitative (focus groups with university students (n=7) and in-depth interviews with parents of university students (n=20)) methods of collecting information. The analysis revealed changes in the interactions of students and their parents, mainly related to the transformation of the nature, form of education and activity of students. It is shown that the implementation of the functions of interaction between students and their parents allows minimizing the risks of non-compliance of the chosen specialty with the needs and interests of students, reducing educational, professional motivation, poor-quality vocational training at university.

The article presents the results of qualitative sociologic survey aimed at analyzing students’ subjective evaluations related to “new” educational practices from the perspective of the experience gained in the pandemic period, as well as the dynamics of changes in the content of these evaluations during the year due to the transition to new learning formats. The purpose of the study is to assess the impact of forced online learning on the transformation of traditional educational practices. Following the results of work with qualitative data, the main trends observed in the informants’ answers are shown – increase of academic workload and, as a consequence, the time spent for its performance; absence of former attitude and concentration of attention on the learning material caused by the impossibility to draw boundaries between private and public, that in its turn had an impact on the quality of education and gave rise to new practices of academic dishonesty and cheating; and as a whole, downturn of psychological wellbeing. Main positive moments named by the informants were increase of the capabilities of the educational field and a certain level of comfort in the sphere of everyday life, logistics and work. It is noted that even with the outright victory over the COVID-19 it will be impossible to return completely to pre-covid variant of organization of educational process; whether we like it or not, electronic educational environments have already become an integral part of our life and higher education. The main questions that must be asked now – which of pre-covid and gained practices should be taken into the future, how to find the balance between intramural and online learning formats. Search for solutions depends to a large extent on the success of interaction and cooperation between the direct participants of educational process. Main method of data collection is semi-structured interviews; field works have been carried out in spring of 2020 and 2021. The interview method made it possible to study the situation in detail as it has developed. Based on the generalization of qualitative data, the substantial characteristics of the informants’ value judgments are formed, strong and weak sides of the learning process related to introduction of new formats of interaction “university – teacher – student”. The ambivalent attitude of students to full-time and distance learning was revealed. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the data acquisition, systematization and analytical generalization of the original material on the transformation of students’ educational practices as a result of a forced mass transition to distance education. The obtained materials provide grounds for clarifying the process and results of these changes and can be used to justify management decisions.

The research is aimed at studying the opinion of university students on corruption in higher education. Researchers give ambiguous assessments of the nature of corruption in higher education, therefore, the purpose of the work is to determine the nature of corruption, the causes of its reproduction, as well as factors that, according to students, can reduce its level based on the study of students’ opinions on corruption in higher education. The methodological basis of the research was the works of leading foreign and Russian scientists. The study was conducted using general scientific methods, such as system analysis, questionnaires, generalization and systematization, and comparisons. The results of student survey (N=400) and 12 individual semi-structured interviews of students of the Ural State University of Economics and St. Petersburg State University collected in 2021 constitute an empirical base. It was found that the majority of university students have a superficial understanding of the essence of corruption and tend to tolerate it. The majority of students did not participate in corruption relations, but a third of respondents consider it as a means suitable for solving private problems. According to the students, the factors that have the greatest impact on the reproduction of corruption relations at university are the low level of remuneration of teachers, the low moral level of teachers and staff, as well as the lack of proper administrative control. The greatest impact on reducing corruption in higher education, in the opinion of the students, are the factors of increasing responsibility for corruption offenses, raising teachers’ salaries and strengthening administrative control at the university.

The paper follows into the critical pedagogy tradition. It analyzes discourses of renewing the sense of teaching liberal disciplines, philosophical ones in the first place, in higher school, with factors of lowering their status identified in it. Among those factors are as follows: giving up the acknowledgement of liberal education crisis, disciplinary isolation, prevalence of scholarly activity model in academic subjects design, and subordination to “knowledge acquisition” process in the organization of educational practice. Education’s processual organization is opposed by an event one, in which a liberal knowledge status is determined in terms of “otherness”. The article considers a student’s gaining experience with otherness as a new mission of liberal disciplines in higher education, whereas this kind of experience is treated as an attempt to build a new educational universalism.

The article continues the discussion of teaching humanities disciplines in technical universities, which has been going on for several years on the pages of our journal. First of all, the authors object to raising the question of teaching humanities knowledge in technical universities “in general” and reject the unambiguous recommendations and prescriptions addressed to teachers “for all occasions”. The authors’ position can be formulated as a search and selection of cases that are most appropriate for promoting the overlapping cultures of science/engineering/technical and humanities. They share their approaches to the problem outlined against the background of critical reflection on A.A. Polonnikov’s article published in the same issue. Contradicting their colleague in the teaching profession, the authors emphasize the importance of the humanities teacher’s creativity and at the same time defend the principle of recursive continuity (“rational simplicity”) once proclaimed by Michel Foucault: “Not all discursive strategies are equally possible, but only those that are allowed by the preceding levels”.

The article is a book review on “Ethnography of Bogus. Who and how writes customized academic essays in Russia” by A. Davydov and P. Abramov (Moscow: Khamovniki Foundation for Social Research: Common Place, 2021, 176 p.). This book describes the practices of contract cheating in Russian higher education as an established social institution involving undergraduate and graduate students. “Ethnography of Bogus” presents the faculty staff only as a resource for the market of ghostwriting: an explicit resource when teachers of higher education become ghostwriters, or an implicit resource, when formalist assessment mechanisms of student work contribute to the development of ghostwriting practices. The description of ghostwriting practices in the study reveals the decline of the concept of research advisor for undergraduate and graduate students, due to the precarity of teachers in higher education. The decline is incited by mass student entry policy and efficient management mechanisms of higher education institutions. As a result, the students who turn to contract cheating in a regular manner do not develop professional and academic skills appropriate to an undergraduate or graduate degree. The students develop their soft skills required in interactions with ghost-writers when they negotiate the terms of contract cheating as customers of writing services.

Reflective theorizations about the state and prospects for the development of domestic education clearly recognize two trends in its future – continuity and individualization. In addition, the tendency of an “axiological turn” in the sense of education as a value and the value of education itself is clearly articulated. Modern pluralism of educational practices indicates the possibility of an individual to become the main subject of a new type of educational interaction based on independent institutionalization. Does the trend of “axiological turn” have ontological grounds for the sanctioned possibility of free change in the subjectivity of an individual in the educational space on fundamentally new methodological grounds? Or is it a continuation of the methodological tradition of axiological subjectivism? In order to find the foundations of a new axiological tradition in the educational space, a theoretical formalization of the category of “value” in the historical and philosophical tradition is being developed, and the results of this formalization are projected onto modern Russian education.
On the one hand, the interpretation of educational values as skills, abilities and competencies is nothing more than an objective requirement of a dynamically changing socio-cultural situation with its ever-increasing uncertainty. On the other hand, the “axiological turn”, to a much greater extent, is associated with a change in the value orientations of the individual him/herself. This, with a special degree of efficiency and dynamism, is expressed in a change in the nature of educational-individual trajectories towards the professionalization of educational practices with a simultaneous strengthening of their meta-component. It is emphasized that meta-skills, along with existential skills, are the general vectors in the development of the axiological ecosystem of education. Based on the historical and philosophical review of the understanding of values and ideas about education as a way of reproducing culture (in the dialectic of alienation and appropriation of social values), the conclusion is formulated that modern concepts of the reversal of educational practices are, to a certain extent, private explications of axiological subjectivism.

Data science as an emerging branch of applied knowledge and a new field of study is showing a strong momentum. Besides, the corresponding sphere of educational research is actively developing. At the same time, most of the scientific publications are aimed at studying specific issues related to the content of the programs and their methodological support. The wider context and especially the international perspective are lacking for the necessary attention of researchers.
In this regard, the purpose of our study was to summarize and systematize information about training programs in the field of data science presented on online platforms of the main macro-regions – America, Europe and Asia. For this purpose, we found out what elements the corpus of data science training programs consists of, as well as how courses are distributed on educational platforms by countries, organizational providers, level of education and duration of study. Based on the data obtained, we conducted a comparative interregional study of educational programs presented on online platforms.
The findings made it possible to draw conclusions about the specifics of the global landscape of data science online education, as well as to determine the specifics of the Russian segment and to formulate recommendations for solving significant problems of the domestic economy using data science online education.

The paper discusses the problem of e-learning accessibility for persons with disabilities. Development of e-learning content accessible to all students is gaining special relevance in the context of global trends in higher education related to the massive transition of learning to distance and hybrid formats. Based on the analysis of the official websites of 25 world’s top universities (according to the QS World University Rankings 2021), data on university digital accessibility services were systematized. The data search was carried out by total browsing of university sites’ structure and headings and by keywords. Data on 14 checklist categories were registered. Signs of administrative and project activities in the field of digital accessibility were found for 20 universities (80%), among which 10 (40%) have specialized structural subdivisions for digital accessibility. The content of digital accessibility web services contains data on the following topics: training in digital accessibility for educational content for authors and developers (14 university sites – 56%); a guide for authors (15–60%) and web developers (12–48%); consulting and assistance for authors and web developers (17–68%); accessibility examination (5–20%); legal norms (11–44%) and accessibility standards (16–64%); accessibility testing guide (16–64%); procurement requirements for accessible web products and services (8–32%); frequently asked questions (6–24%), etc. Based on the results of the analysis, the model of university digital accessibility services was developed and corresponding web site was published. It seems important to create similar web resources and corresponding structural subdivisions in universities of the Russian Federation, as well as to approve the intra-university local acts regulating the mandatory fulfillment of digital accessibility requirements in the development of educational content and the procurement of digital products and services. GOST R 52872-2019, based on WCAG 2.1, should be used as the basis for local legal regulations.