The risks of non-fulfillment of the target indicators of the federal project “Export of Education”, which are systemic in nature and are associated with the peculiarities of the socio-economic, cultural development of Russian regions and their conditions for implementing the internationalization of higher education, have undergone a transformation during 2020-2021 in the context of a pandemic and active use of distance technologies and electronic educational resources. This placed the emphasis on the level of competitiveness and the development of these technologies in comparison with large international providers - foreign universities. The goal of this paper is to identify and substantiate internationalization features of Russian higher education at the regional level and to forecast further scenarios of development in the context of a long term impact on public policy in this area. The research revealed and systematized the features of the internationalization of higher education at the regional level with their division into positive, negative, and crisis features. Trends in the number and structure of foreign students studying in Russia were identified and analyzed. The calculation of the effective rating of foreign students by importing countries was carried out. The authors developed and tested a six-factor function for assessing the level of internationalization of the university. The paper presents a model of interaction between regional universities and universities participating in the implementation of the Federal project “Export of Education”.

internationalization, export of education, networking form, international students’ recruitment, regional universities, digitalization.