Digital footprint in predicting school graduates’ educational strategy

This research article aims at evaluating the results of the school graduates’ educational strategy transformation with the help of digital footprint data. The analysis of official and unofficial Internet communities of universities in the social network «VKontakte» shows that their active users are school graduates, who thus receive the necessary information about the university. The method presented can become a promising tool to forecast the demand for higher education. The study covers the period from 2019 to 2021, a total of 502 thousand user profiles having been identified, 246 thousand accounts included in the final sample. The results show that during the analyzed period the number of user subscriptions to university communities has decreased in all Russian regions. The orientation towards universities located in other regions has also changed: these were more popular before the pandemic, being subscribed to by the majority of students, whereas after the spread of COVID-19, most of the graduates began to choose universities located in their native region. A significant limitation of this method is that a number of profiles are closed, which logically does not allow to use them in further analysis. The results of the study show, however, high validity and wide opportunities for the use of the digital footprint method when predicting young people’s educational trajectory and planning the enrollment campaign, both on the scale of the university and the whole country.