Starting positions of university applicants and features of their further education: A sociological analysis

The article considers the features of students’ educational trajectories as depending on how they entered the university. A distinctive feature of the Russian system of higher education is various grounds for the educational transition “school-university”: the results of the Unified State Exam, school Academic Olympics in key subjects, employer-sponsored education, and quotas. These grounds seem to affect the further education of students and the quality of training and professional trajectories. At the same time, the resistance of the higher education system to external challenges, its sustainable competitiveness, modernization and the search for new forms and models of work with the talented youth are priority development tasks of the national higher education system. The article presents the results of the comparative analysis of the students’ motivation for learning, educational achievements, ideas about possible professional and educational trajectories. The analysis is based on the data of the Russian students survey conducted by the Center for Educational Development Strategy of the Lomonosov Moscow State University and RUDN University in November-December 2021 (N = 37457). The research findings show that at the stage of the transition from school to university, there is a very heterogeneous student inflow by quality and forms of training, individual abilities and inclinations, motivation and requests to the higher education. There is a special group - prize-winners of school Academic Olympics - of the most talented and promising applicants. The admission companies show that variable grounds for entering universities lead to certain conflicts and contradictions in the higher education system.