Marina Vetchinova - Doctor of Sciences in Pedagogy, Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Professional Communication, Kursk State University. Address: 33 Radishcheva Str., 305000 Kursk, Russian Federation. E-mail: marx2003@list.ru

As globalization accelerates around the globe, universities are becoming acritical national resource. The book captures a broad range of problems faced by universities in the era of globalization and crisis intervention processes, including the development of new business strategies, the upgrade of education programs to enable graduates to integrate into the global labor market, and the provision of universities’ competitiveness in the education market. Alternative versions of university education in the information age are proposed along with such innovative institutional models as open university, network university, multiversity and educational hub. All the three sections of the monograph — the theory, the background and the project — describe in parallel the experience, regularities and prospects of the development of higher education systems in Russia and Germany. The book goes into the sociocultural foundations of the higher education systems and the evolution of the sociocultural concept of “education” in Russia and Germany. Examples of Russian and German universities are used to demonstrate how international cooperation in higher education could be organized and maintained.