Abstract
Universities, being the center of highly qualified scientific and pedagogical personnel, have the opportunity to create scientific schools, attract young scientists to a scientific career and form a scientific elite among gifted students, thus integrating theory and practice, science and education, influencing the development of scientific knowledge. Scientific potential, the development of fundamental and applied science are criteria for the competitiveness of universities in the educational services market. Thus, it is relevant to find effective ways to train scientific personnel and comprehensively study systems of scientific and scientific-technical activities of universities. The purpose of this study is to compare scientific and scientific-technical activities of agrarian and economic universities in Russia, Kazakhstan and Bulgaria, where personnel is trained for one of the leading industries in these countries. An anonymous online survey based on a specially designed questionnaire was conducted; it involved 162 respondents from the countries above - scientific and pedagogical staff of agrarian and economic universities. The results of the present study, in comparison with the data of scientific literature, allow one to assert that the common global problems in universities are unstable funding and a decline in the prestige of a scientific career. The latter makes it difficult to attract young people to science, leads to aging of scientific personnel, dissatisfaction with work, and the risk of professional burnout. At the same time, fierce competition imposes increased requirements on the quality of universities' scientific products and their promotion in the market of research and scientific-pedagogical services. A feature of the modern world is the integration of scientific and scientific-technical activities of individual higher educational institutions into the international scientific environment, which not only provides new opportunities for research, the development of human resources, and mastery of new high technologies, but also exacerbates the problem of compliance with bioethical norms and academic decency, management of scientific resources and protection of intellectual property at all levels. As a result of the research, general and distinctive features of scientific and scientific-technical activities of agrarian and economic universities of Russia, Kazakhstan, and Bulgaria have been identified. Based on the empirical data obtained and their comparison with the results of an analytical review of scientific literature, a generalized universal model of the system of universities' scientific and scientific-technical activities has been created, which will optimize the reform process and contribute to the development of research potential.