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The article presents some of the results of a questionnaire survey of students in the South of Russia, conducted in 2019. The subject of the study carried out in the article was the emigration moods and attitudes of the student youth of the South of Russia, and the goal was the explication of the factors on which these attitudes depend. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study was the author's concept of cognitive-ideological matrices, which implies the study of the pre-reflective level of individual and group consciousness in order to identify proto-ideological elements (ideologemes and concepts) that form an individual's predisposition to a particular ideology. On this basis, the article identifies the deep motives of the emigration attitudes of student consciousness and solves the problem of establishing the strength of the connection between socio-economic and value-ideological factors in the formation of these attitudes. As a result of the analysis, it is shown that value factors prevail over socio-economic ones. It has been established that the ideologically conditioned attitude towards emigration from the country was formed in the context of the values of the liberal and social-democratic ideologies, which, in turn, turned out to be consonant with those proto-ideological concepts of self-identification that were formed in the process of early socialization of student youth. The general conclusion of the study: ideological values and attitudes are derivatives of the deep mechanisms of cognitive-value matrices, at the level of which proto-ideological elements are formed, which, in turn, form an individual's tendency to perceive certain ideological values. The theoretical significance of the work lies in the refinement and development of the modern theory of ideologies due to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms for the formation of ideological concepts, and the practical significance lies in the development of applied aspects of the study of ideological dynamics in the mass consciousness.