Monitoring applicants as a tool for assessing the university economic sustainability

The paper discusses the features of measuring the educational trajectories of applicants and their choice of educational programs. Moreover, it actualizes the importance of monitoring students’ applications based on statistics and survey data to analyze the university competitiveness and its economic sustainability. The motivation of prospective students, their academic achievements in the school determinate the professional future direction and the formation of certain educational trajectories in the university. The sources of empirical data is secondary analysis results of Monitoring university effectiveness in 2017-2019, as well as sociological research of prospective students in 2020. The results of the study show that there is a high selectivity for admissions in the national research and federal universities. The master’s degree students proportion in Russian universities increase. At the same time, the key motivation for studying in master’s programs is economic (high demand in the labor market, good salaries after the university and career development). Despite the fact that there is a stereotype that «weak» students (with low entry scores) are enrolled predominantly in fee-based training (the contract), the indicator dynamics over three years show that the average entry scores are higher among contract prospective students (this is due to the fashion for some educational programs and universities heterogeneity within this group). The systematic practices of analyzing the formation of prospective student’s educational trajectories contribute to the early identification of admission heterogeneity and adjusting its quality, as a result, its help to evaluate the effectiveness of university development strategy and predict the amount of budget funding.