Abstract:

The purpose of the article is to highlight the international cooperation in the field of higher education from the perspective of identifying, on the one hand, general trends characteristic of the world educational area, and, on the other hand, country and regional peculiarities. The authors have identified the several trends that manifest themselves in the world educational area. These general trends have been shaped by the processes of globalization and they reflect the development of the international cooperation in the conditions of functioning of the developed world market of educational services, a high degree of hominization of the educational area, unification of the educational standards and qualification characteristics of a specialist with a university degree.
In recent years, several countries have implemented new approaches to the development of the international cooperation at the level of public and private universities. The result of the implementation of these country such approaches is the setting up and development of new institutions of university cooperation and their close interaction. The authors have analyzed some tendencies of the development of the international cooperation between Russian universities and the foreign universities as the creation of university consortia, the association "Global Universities", the network scientific center for interdisciplinary research of human potential and other international cooperation institutions. In the study, special attention is paid to the setting up the international scientific clusters and self-governing scientific organizations for international financing of research projects of universities with the participation of universities from different countries.
The article describes that a relatively new trend in the development of international cooperation is the participation of the educational structures of the Russian banks and other financial institutions in it. Leading Russian banks as Sberbank, Alfa Bank, Otkritie actively implements educational projects not only independently, but also in cooperation with universities and banks of countries included in integration structures with the participation of Russia and Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS countries.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the international relations between universities from different countries have strengthened due to the use of the remote forms of organizing the educational process. The widespread use of distance learning technologies is in line with general trends in the development of the international cooperation. At the same time, based on the analysis of documents and some facts, the authors have shown that a new tendency is to strengthen the role of those universities in the field of international cooperation of countries that are part of integration regional associations.
The findings allow us to identify that there is currently a definite trend towards the regionalization of the educational area within the framework of the emerging inter-country integration structures, including with the participation of Russia and China. In these integration associations, new institutions of the international cooperation in the field of higher education are being born more intensively, which will determine the promising trends of its development in the future.

Keywords:

International cooperation, higher education, world educational area, general trends, regionalization of the educational area.