The Astana Times provides news and information from Kazakhstan and around the world. Less than two years after independence, Kazakhstan made a bet that education could not wait for the economy and institutions to catch up, it would have to lead them. 5, 1993, the government established the Bolashak International Scholarship, sending promising young citizens to top universities abroad to become specialists in a fledgling state urgently needed economists, engineers, diplomats, administrators.
Knowledge, in effect, became national infrastructure, ranked alongside new laws and new ministries. More than 13,000 Bolashak graduates have since come home. But the sharpest test of that 30-year strategy did not happen on a foreign campus.
It came in December 2023, when the OECD released the results of its 2022 PISA test, a global assessment of 15-year-olds’ skills and Kazakhstani teenagers scored below the OECD average in mathematics, reading and science alike. That gap is not a verdict on three decades of reform. It is the next milestone in the same strategy.
Betting on flagships By the late 2000s, sending students abroad was no longer enough, Kazakhstan needed institutions at home that could operate under different rules. The Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools opened as laboratories for new curricula and assessment. In 2010, Nazarbayev University opened in Astana as an autonomous research university, and a 2011 law carved out a distinct legal framework giving both institutional autonomy and academic freedom the rest of the system did not have.
That same year, Kazakhstan became the first Central Asian country to join the European Higher Education Area, aligning its degrees with the Bologna framework and opening the door to academic mobility with Europe. The strategy worked, narrowly, it let officials pilot new admissions systems, teaching methods and research practices without waiting for the whole country to move together. But it also created Kazakhstan’s central education challenge that Excellence built under exceptional conditions does not spread on its own.
Five ministers, one dilemma The education ministry’s revolving door shows the reform agenda evolving in real time. Bakhytzhan Zhumagulov, minister from 2010 to 2013, built the new architecture. His successor, Aslan Sarinzhipov, who served until 2016, pushed university autonomy and closer ties b…
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