The coronavirus pandemic forced universities to switch to one hundred percent use of distance learning technologies in higher education programs, while students partially returned to their home cities, including cities outside of Russia, and partially remained in university dormitories. The task of universities to provide a meaningful level of higher education programs has remained unchanged. The complexity of the situation was partially offset by the creation, over the past few years, of online courses in Russian and English for national and international educational platforms, which made it possible to fill the need for non-digitized training sessions. Several leading universities have made their online courses freely available to all students. Organizational support for the implementation of educational programs in full was provided by the opening of access to library resources of leading universities, including databases in a subscription. In this case, both the leading universities of Russia and corporations of universities (the Association of Leading Universities, the Association of Global Universities, the Russian Union of Rectors) took an active position. The testing of the higher education system by the epidemiological situation revealed the need to develop common approaches for the implementation of various digital resources available on the Internet into the educational process and the joint use of public property in the interests of the digitalization process. Increasing the role of universities` independence in making the necessary management decisions is a prerequisite for overcoming the extreme manifestation of the isolation of Russian universities and the transition to a corporate solution of strategic issues of higher education, the key of which today is the digitalization of the content of educational programs and tools of the educational process.