Drawing up a collective portrait of the faculty corporation using prosopography and statistical analysis is one of the most popular approaches among specialists in the history of higher education in the Russian Empire. However, mostly such researches concern only one of the existed educational institutions. At the same time, comparative analysis of various universities allows to get a more complete picture of the specifics of higher education. Authors of the given paper try to compare the main features of the career path and academic mobility of the university lecturers at the capital (St. Petersburg) and provincial (Novorossiysk and Tomsk) universities. Among the compared aspects: the length of work, the availability of a scientific degree, the ratio of professors and junior teachers, the number of own graduates, etc. These and other data made it possible to identify the main models of a scientific career typical for the capital and the province.