The Media Education Component in the Educational Programs of Russian Universities: A Content-Quantitative and Terminological Analysis of a Typological Sample

The study examines the media education component in bachelor's, specialist's, and master's programs at Russian universities, with attention to institutional-type and regional factors. Programs are treated as formalized, comparable units of analysis, allowing assessment of institutional features of media education. Existing scholarship largely addresses theoretical concepts and individual practices, while the structural distribution of the component across programs remains understudied – a gap this study addresses through quantitative description and distribution analysis. The subject also includes the nomenclature of media-core disciplines as terminology reflecting the conceptual apparatus of media education in this typological sample. Programs are treated as formalized, comparable objects, accounting for university type, level of study, and regional division. The study combines quantitative analysis of curricula, program descriptions, and professional competencies with terminological analysis of media-core discipline names. The final sample comprised 96 programs. The novelty lies in a quantitative-comparative analysis of the component's distribution across Russian university programs. Average media-core share is comparable across university types; differences appear mainly in program numbers, not media-core volume. Regional analysis showed no pronounced dependence on territorial affiliation, suggesting the component is a stable structural element of these programs. Results may inform further research on the institutionalization of media education. Terminological analysis revealed a high proportion of uniquely worded discipline titles, tentatively read as a sign of incomplete terminological consolidation. Conclusions are bounded by the sample studied (23 universities, 96 programs) and do not extend to Russian higher education as a whole.