Popular areas of training for persons with disabilities and educational migrants when entering Russian universities

Introduction. Much attention is paid worldwide to the development of an education system that should provide quality education for each person. This is especially true for certain specific categories of citizens: people with disabilities, educational migrants. The study was aimed at determining, based on an analysis of the admission of people with disabilities and educational migrants to universities, which areas of training and specialties were the most popular among these categories. Materials and methods. The study materials were statistical data from the state federal reporting form for 2022: No. VPO-1 “Information on the organization performing educational activities under higher education programs – bachelor’s degree programs, specialist programs, master’s degree programs” for state higher education organizations in terms of full-time education at the beginning of the 2022/23 academic year. The study used methods of comparative analysis and descriptive statistics, methods of analysis and synthesis, decision theory, mathematical modeling and statistical data analysis. Results. The maximum values of the share of individuals with disabilities and educational migrants in the total admission to universities corresponded to different regions and federal districts: for individuals with disabilities, it was the North Caucasus Federal District, for educational migrants – St. Petersburg, Sevastopol, Leningrad and Tver regions. The analysis identified 11 most popular areas of training for individuals with disabilities and 16 for educational migrants. Five integrated groups of specialties and areas of training (UGSN) could be considered the universal all-Russian choice of areas of training and specialties upon admission to universities for these categories: 31.00.00 – Clinical Medicine; 09.00.00 – Informatics and Computer Engineering; 44.00.00 – Education and Pedagogical Sciences; 38.00.00 – Economics and Management; 40.00.00 – Jurisprudence. For each category of applicants, admission formulas had been compiled, which represented the ratio of the number of UGSN from the corresponding fields of science. Discussion and conclusion. A comparative analysis of the general admission to universities showed that for individuals with disabilities, the leading areas of admission were UGSN from the field of sciences – sciences about society, while for educational migrants these were engineering, technology and technical sciences. In both categories, the second most popular area of science was health care and medical sciences. The third position was occupied by sciences from the first places of the opposite categories. The least interest among individuals with disabilities was paid to UGSN of engineering areas, where training and further work activity were associated with greater difficulties.