Universities of World-Class Scientific and Educational Centers and Their Importance in the Performance Indicators and Development of Regions

Abstract

The article considers the sphere of education as one of the directions of political and managerial practices for the development of regions. The importance of educational institutions of higher education as part of world-class scientific and educational centers (RECs) created in the context of the implementation of the national project “Science” is evaluated. The task assigned to the centers to activate interregional interaction, as expected, will contribute to the innovative development of the subjects of the Russian Federation and the economic and technological connectivity of the territories. In the context of the task, data from the official REC websites, data from the international rating THE, the Moscow international rating MosIUR for 2020, regulatory legal acts, as well as secondary data on the problem under study are analyzed. It is shown that RECs have become a kind of superstructure (construction), uniting several groups of actors under one sign of the center: universities, scientific organizations, organizations from the real sector of the economy, supported by the subject of the Russian Federation under the personal control of the governors. The peculiarity of such centers was not only the association of universities with high international ratings from different regions, but also the participation of the same university in several RECs. Such an organizational technique, by pulling together the north and south, the west and the east, the inclusion of the same universities in different RECs, suggests that this, on the one hand, strengthens interregional interaction, increases the values of the performance indicators of the project participants, but on the other hand, complicates the objective assessment of the REC activities themselves. Based on the study, the hypothesis is expressed that the existing approaches to assessing the effectiveness of REC generate a variety of imitation forms of activity, including reporting, and need to be improved. It is concluded that the activities of RECs will contribute to the breakthrough development of those regions on the territory of which they are formed, but at the same time strengthen interregional imbalances.