Identifying gravity zones of higher school centers by digital traces of social media users

In the information society, social media data, along with official statistics and sociological surveys, are becoming an important source of information about population migration. The article analyzes the possibilities and experience of using «VKontakte» user profiles for studying internal educational migration. The main purpose of the study is to identify the leading higher school centers that attract interregional educational migrants. The principal research method used is analysis of digital traces of social network users. As a result, there have been identified the influence zones of 23 cities being the leading higher education centers in the Russian Federation. Among them are the cities that meet one of the following criteria: having a university with the «Federal» status or being included in the top 10 in Russia according to the QS World University Rankings 2022, population of the city- over 1 million people. The ratio of the number of the social network users is calculated for each zone: students in regions of the gravity center, students in all or only in «their» leading center of higher education. Territorial proximity has turned out not to be a determining factor when forming higher education areas in modern Russia. Formation of educational flows is influenced by a combination of factors: prestige of university, quality of education received, proposed areas of training, low cost of education, presence of a big city, socio-economic conditions, and others. It is concluded that the use of data from the «VKontakte» social network for the study of educational migration makes it possible to make a significant progress in studying these processes.