The article presents leaders appointment and selection methodology and procedures, the results of unique studying the competencies of rectors and academic institute leaders including those that ensure effectiveness of the organization. The main attention is paid to the model of managerial competencies as a standard, compliance with which becomes the basis for inclusion in the personnel reserve, and valid evaluation tools. To create the model, a competence-based approach, tools of the national qualification system, and a sociological survey were used.

Authors describe the procedure for selecting potential managers, the methodology for developing case assessment tasks, and the criteria for ensuring the objectivity of evaluating their performance.

It is shown that introduction of the model made it possible to update the qualification requirements for the leaders of universities and academic institutes; to form a system of competencies diagnostics of applicants for managerial positions; to prepare recommendations for the development of professional development programs.

As Russian and international experience shows, the massification of doctoral education is not only a driver of socio-economic development, but also a significant challenge for national policy in the field of higher education and research. The increase in demand for doctoral studies can lead to an enormous decrease in the quality of training unless particular measures for quality assurance and support are implemented. There are dozens of such practices worldwide. In this article, we consider three of them: 1) diversification of doctoral programs; 2) collaboration with industry and business; and 3) improving the quality of supervision. These practices have not yet been implemented in Russian doctoral programs on a systemic level. However, we believe that they are the most relevant and potentially useful for the Russian context, as they can improve the efficiency of doctoral training in terms of the number and quality of defenses, as well as increase the level of graduates’ preparation for the labor market.

The article focuses on the analysis of the current state, problems and key factors in the development of Russian doctoral education in connection with its transition from 2022/2023 academic year to the implementation of a new model in the context of global trends. As a result of analyzing and evaluating statistical data for 2010-2021 and summarizing numerous publications of researchers, the authors conclude that the trend of steady decline in the efficiency of doctoral education over the past decade is a systemic problem. It is proved that the transition to a new model of implementation of doctoral training programs for scientific and scientific-pedagogical staff aimed at improving its effectiveness, strengthening the scientific component and the quality of PhD dissertations is an important and necessary condition, but not sufficient to solve the existing problem. This study is an attempt to systematize the factors affecting the development of doctoral education in Russia, which determine the possibility of creating necessary and sufficient conditions for the effective functioning of the system of training highly qualified personnel. The authors identify three groups of key factors: dynamic changes in the development of the state policy aimed at improving management in the field of training scientific and scientific-pedagogical personnel; developed ecosystem of educational and scientific organizations that provide doctoral education, including infrastructure, information, financial, organizational resources and scientific potential; doctoral students with interest and abilities in research activities, possessing a set of competencies necessary for the development of doctoral education. At the same time, such prospective tasks are considered as increasing reputational responsibility of organizations, which offer programs for training scientific and scientific-pedagogical personnel; forming effective system of targeted training in doctoral education; developing mechanisms for integration of science, higher education and industry by means of creating consortiums, the incentives for which are laid down in the “Priority 2030” university state support program.

Cognitive and value dissonances of the modern world, as well as the shifting balance in the “Technology-nature-society-man” system cause the need to rethink key development strategies, determine the guidelines that education should be guided by in order to be able to respond to the growing global challenges of modernity. The special acuteness of the modern formulation of this problem is due to the new format of the geopolitical life of the Russian Federation and the associated restructuring of many social institutions of the country, in particular, science and education.

The article raises the question of the leading paradigm of domestic engineering education, considered in the prism of a specialist-engineer model that meets the requirements of the modern stage of society.

Education standards have changed dramatically and repeatedly in their target characteristics over the past twenty years. The article considers the features of the competence model of specialist presented in the modern version of the Federal State Educational Standards of higher education (FSES HE). It is shown that the existing version of FSES does not fully meet the requirements for specialists in the modern world. In addition to highly professional knowledge and skills, future engineers need contextual, meta-professional and soft knowledge and skills for life and successful professional activity.

World practice shows that one of the promising areas of training engineers is a project-oriented approach, which emphasizes the practical orientation of higher education. The authors have shown that the recognized international standards of engineering education in the fields of technology, natural and applied sciences (CDIO, STEM education) basically coincide with the world-known and repeatedly tested “Russian method of training engineers”, integrating broad fundamental education in the field of natural sciences and humanities and technological practice at advanced innovative enterprises. This experience which has already given the world great engineers and adapted at the same time to the modern technological capabilities of its transmission can become a fulcrum in a transitive world.

William Clark’s methodological tools applied to the study of the history and philosophy of higher education are presented in a series of articles 1996-2003 and especially in his book “Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University” (2006). The last was a result of Clark’s long and accurate work in many areas of research, most of which have yet formed as academic fields. The author sets an ambitious task to examine evolution of academic practice (mainly German) as a process of bureaucratization and capitalization of education through the prism of academic charisma. Considering it as one of the types of legitimate dominance in the scientific world, W. Clark describes a scholar not in three spatial coordinates (of which he talks in the introduction), but in four: religion, politics, economics, and state/city. The last allows Clark to mark universities that accept or reject certain methods of transferring academic charisma on the educational landscape of the city. Another issue that is a key to the search of the basics of research university, is the question of the gradual suppression of oral culture by writing. In other words, how “say and be” (the phrase invented by the authors of this review) turned into “print or disappear” (aphorism cited many times by the author of the book). This question includes a number of others, which we point out analyzing the academic space, which, in the author’s mind, is broken up, collected and rebroken up into fragments of tables, catalogues, lists, statutes, tables, graphs, reports, questionnaires, dossiers, etc. Despite the fact that the translation of William Clark’s book into Russian was carried out in 2017, the methodology proposed is undeservedly little known to the researchers of higher education and, in general, has not received fundamental review in the scientific tradition. Its main provisions will be outlined in the framework of this article.

The article focuses on the analysis of the role and place of the university in the concepts of restructuring the basic foundations of society on the principles of extensive use of information and communication technologies. It has been established that in the domestic system of training highly qualified personnel for the new economy, the contradictions between its elements are aggravated. On the one hand, universities have a high intellectual potential of teachers and scientists representing generations X and Y; they train the creative part of generation Z. An optimistic future scenario, as a product of university discussions, is presented in the mission of the university. On the other hand, the state and business community define the contours of the future in terms of simplicity, certainty, linear development, and high controllability. This approach is contrary to the global fundamental vectors that indicate the ability to work in conditions of complexity and uncertainty. The methodological basis of the study are systemic, constructivist and transdisciplinary approaches, applying the theoretical foundations of complex systems to social processes, and, above all, to the system of university education in Russia. The main conclusions are the following: 1) uncertainty and complexity of the future are not an obstacle to scenario forecasting in the sphere of higher education as a ground for the knowledge society; 2) this movement will be successful if the state and business community go to a higher level of strategic planning; 3) academically free university, humanistically oriented state reforms and programs of society modernization, socially oriented business (investments for a person) become the targets of the future. The results of the study can be used in the practice of Russian and international university education

School and university, as two stages of continuous education, have a significant impact on forming a young person’s personality. When studying at school, young people cannot always appreciate the usefulness of their knowledge, skills, qualities, and applicability in further studies and life. The article presents the results of the sociological survey on the influence of school and higher education institutions on the development of students’ personal qualities and skills.

The empirical base was the results of a study conducted among 1–3-year students of four Moscow universities: Moscow Aviation Institute (NRU), Moscow State Pedagogical University, Moscow Automobile and Road Construction Institute, and the State Academic University for the Humanities. Questionnaires and mini-interviews were used as research methods. The purpose of the study was to identify the specifics of the influence of school and university on the formation of students’ personal qualities and skills in the Moscow region.

The survey showed that school had the most significant influence on forming the ability to communicate, perform routine work, and subject to the rules, and such qualities as discipline, stress resistance, adaptability, tolerance. While at university, students learn to take the initiative, set goals and realize them, defend their opinion and solve non-standard tasks, be independent and flexible.

The survey participants would like the school to be more focused on developing students’ creative abilities and their own opinions; they lack practice and interaction in the classroom and an individual approach. Nevertheless, many qualities and skills developed at school helped them study at university.

Over the past twenty years, a large number of legislative documents, educational standards have been adopted, effective pedagogical models, methods and approaches to teaching foreign languages have been developed at various levels of education in our country and abroad. The article analyzes these documents to describe the current competencies of teachers of foreign languages of higher education. The developed map of competencies of foreign language teachers, which includes digital, professional communicative, methodological and universal competencies, is the result of theoretical research and analysis of the pedagogical experience of distance professional development programs for teachers of foreign languages, designed at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Regional Studies of Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov. This map can be used as a tool for professional development, since it will allow teachers of foreign languages: to reflect and identify some gaps in their professional development; set short-term and long-term goals; determine the best ways to boost their professional growth; to create innovative models of professional development of teachers, based on a combination of fundamental professional knowledge, professional competencies and skills and assuming the formation of innovative thinking of university employees.

The knowledge-based model of education, in which the formation of the students’ skills to critically think, evaluate, analyze information and use it in their own research comes to the fore. However, it is necessary to note that the level of academic literacy is low, because students lack the academic writing skills needed to become successful professionals after graduation. This problem is caused by the lack of students’ motivation to write academic texts and present the result of their research work in front of the audience, the insufficient number of modern methods and approaches to teaching academic writing, the lack of special courses aimed at foreign language writing competence developing, as well as the absence of strategies for the formation of academic literacy which is the key competence for creating new knowledge. The article presents an analysis of the phenomenon of “academic literacy,” its structural components, on the basis of which the author suggests the indicators of its formation among undergraduates. Since academic literacy depends on the ability to communicate in academic discourse, the author of the article describes the experience of organizing the process of teaching written forms of professional and scientific communication to master’s degree students in law within the framework of the discipline “Foreign Language in Professional Communication.” Consistent writing skills training makes it possible to realize the requirements for academic literacy, namely: the ability to critically think, analyze information, accept and respect someone else’s point of view, create new knowledge, express ideas in a well-structured and accessible form, work independently, as well as evaluate the results of work. The process of mastering academic writing skills facilitates academic literacy of students, which opens up opportunities for effective communication in the academic community, as well as the successful integration of future specialists into scientific professional communities.