The article describes the determinants that are manifested in regional social-economic complexes and determine the main trends of development and educational activities for regional universities. The authors determined and characterized such determinants as social-economic (or financial, and infrastructural) uneven development of Russia; the economic mechanism of higher education economic accessibility stratification; the need to equalize the professional educational network in the regions of Russia to ensure the development of the intellectual and professional potential of regions and the gradual equalization of Russia economic development in terms of regional and geographical dimensions; the degree of "openness-closure" concerning a regional university and the development of understanding that a university is a system by its structural and functional organization and, consequently, the subject to the laws of social, ethnic, state and regional morphology of education; an ambiguous (often negative or neutral) attitude of teachers and organizers of higher education to innovations, which creates the contradictions and extends the periods of crisis processes in the educational system of a regional university.

“Smart City” is a key urban trend of our time. The principle of applying the “smart city” model in modern socio-economic systems management in the form of cities, districts, regions and even countries is based on the fact that the urban space is equipped with a digitalization function to increase the urban space comfort for the residents and the guests of this territory. In Russia, this concept introduction founder for objective reasons - the territory size, cargo and passenger flows, a huge tourist and recreational cluster – has become the capital - the city of Moscow [1]. At present, at the state level, the question about the need to develop and implement projects in the “smart city” sphere in small cities, and especially in single-industry towns [2, 3], in the view of solving the able-bodied population outflow key problem from the cities of this type has been raised.

The gradual transformation of the higher education system that has been observed over the past few decades, especially against the backdrop of the challenges of the 2020 pandemic, has actualized the need to study the causes underlying it. The study of the education industry as one of the elements of the division of labor showed that the main drivers of the process are, on the one hand, the employers' market, which demands from modern workers high adaptability and the ability to switch between spheres of activity, and on the other, the labor market itself, which is subject to deepening automation while maintaining and, in many countries, increasing the proportion of the older population. Intensive global socio-cultural changes are leading to a revision of existing educational systems and their global transformation. Humanity uses education as the main social mechanism to purposefully influence the course of its development. The formation of human capital for sustainable development is one of the priorities of the future, transforming the modern education system, changing its goals, content, forms and methods of teaching.