Abstract:

The innovative economy of the 21st century is characterized by the increasing pace of scientific and technological progress and the intellectualization of the main factors of production. One of the sources for increasing the effectiveness of higher education is internationalization.

Promotion of universities in the international educational market, participation in world rankings, academic mobility of students and lecturers are certainly permanent attributes of the internationalization of education.

The problem of developing a strategy to increase the internationalization of modern universities is quite difficult due to scattered information about market participants and the difficultly predicted competitive status. In the presented paper, approaches to internationalization of a wide range of universities are structured and differentiated. To solve this problem, methods of multidimensional cluster analysis are involved.

A set of 32 universities represented in the global and local educational markets was considered as an object of research, in particular, these are world-class universities located in the USA, Western Europe, China, Japan, as well as the flagship universities of the Russian competitiveness system.

Earlier, the author conducted a factor analysis of a fixed array of universities, identified 7 generalized factors characterizing the activities of universities: financial resources, international interaction, the reputation of a university, the competitiveness of students and graduates, transparency, the level of publication activity, and the developed level of infrastructure. In our opinion, the factors “financial resources” and “international interaction” are the most important for the analysis of internationalization.

To assess the possibilities and develop strategies for the international activities of higher education institutions, it is necessary to carry out hierarchical clustering of universities in order to segregate many universities into smaller clusters and then develop a strategy to increase internationalization in each cluster.

The study was conducted using the SPSS statistical analysis program. As a result of the cluster analysis, a dendrogram is constructed that displays the interconnections between objects from a given set. In the process of cluster modeling, a hierarchical set is obtained, representing 3 almost homogeneous groups.

Cluster analysis revealed the existence of 3 clusters of universities, showing a differentiation in the level of development of higher education institutions, nominated by us as “grandmasters”, “masters” and “candidates”.

For each type of university, original strategic solutions to increase internationalization are proposed.

Keywords:

World class universities, federal universities, internationalization of higher education, clustering of universities.