International students’ culture clusterization in the context of Export of Education federal project implementation
The educational services export is an important competitive advantage that makes an impact upon not only the education system and the research sector, but also has political and cultural dimensions that have implications for the relations and interactions between the countries at the present stage. Authors substantiate the idea that Russia has a number of competitive advantages connected with attracting international students to the local educational services market. The educational services export system development strategy is treated from the point of view of attracting international students possessing different social and cultural backgrounds. The implementation of this approach is deemed to be the most productive strategy, as it allows us to explore the degree of cultural differences between the hosting Russian society that has certain political, legal, ethnic and cultural rules, values and traditions and representatives of other social and cultural systems (i.e. international students). Therefore, the purpose of the research is to integrate the international students into certain cultural clusters taking into account their home countries. The authors use structural, systemic, and comparative approaches when doing the research and examines statistical data on the number of international students in the USSR and Russia. A technique of cluster analysis has been proposed for use by authors in order to develop a more efficient strategy for adjusting international students to the social and cultural environment of the hosting Russian universities. The article substantiates the need to use two key criteria (i. e. geographic and cultural criteria) when making the cluster analysis. We suggest that such culture-based clusters should be used as European; Asian, Middle Eastern and Arabic; African; North American and Latin American. Cultural similarity-based grouping of nations is useful for identifying the similarities and differences between the students coming from different countries and regions around the world. From a practical perspective, clustering provides a basis for monitoring social and cultural diversity in a university.