The variety of worldwide college students in Kazakhstan reached 31,500 final 12 months, marking an all-time excessive because the Central Asian vacation spot strives to draw 100,000 college students from overseas by 2028.
“We’ve launched a brand new marketing campaign known as Examine in Kazakhstan … It’s attracting expertise, it’s constructing fame: to this point, so good,” Kazakhstan’s minister for science and better know-how, Sayasat Nurbek, advised The PIE Information.
For the primary time, the variety of college students coming to Kazakhstan from Asia exceeded that of scholars from Commonwealth of Impartial States (CIS) international locations of the previous Soviet Union, with the most important cohorts coming from India, Russia and China, Nurbek defined.
The inflow of greater than 3,000 Russian college students displays a reversal of the normal move of scholars from Kazakhstan into Russia, because the Russia-Ukraine struggle continues to reshape Eurasia’s worldwide schooling panorama.
Transnational schooling is turning into one of many nice instruments to truly ship on schooling’s nice promise
Sayasat Nurbek, Kazakhstan Authorities
“Traditionally, Russia and Ukraine have been educational mobility hubs, however Ukraine is out of the image and Russia went out of the Bologna Course of two years in the past, so numerous college students within the area are actually in search of alternate options,” mentioned Nurbek, referring to the intergovernmental settlement on European larger schooling.
A significant strand of Kazakhstan’s internationalisation technique is to draw funding from worldwide universities, with almost 40 TNE partnerships established up to now three years, together with 5 department campuses.
“We’re making an attempt to work for the broader area of larger Eurasia the place over half of the 2 billion individuals are below the age of 25,” mentioned Nurbek, including that Kazakhstan was experiencing a “demographic explosion” fuelling the demand for larger schooling.
The most recent partnership – which Nurbek known as the “gem of gems” – was established between Colorado College of Mines and Nazarbayev College (NU) in Kazakhstan to develop NU’s analysis capability and graduate program, and to recruit college to work on the college.
Among the many establishments opening department campuses are Cardiff College, Coventry College and De Montfort College within the UK, in addition to Woosong College in Turkestan and KAIST, South Korea’s first public analysis college.
Kazakhstan’s formidable TNE technique is being spearheaded by beneficiant authorities incentives, with land offered free of charge for universities organising “bricks and mortar” campuses, in line with Nurbek.
“We take into account our educational companions as strategic traders, so they’re given the identical tax preferences,” he mentioned.
“We help them financially for no less than 5 to 10 years, in order that they have sufficient public funding to make their department campus sustainable after which they’ve massive flows of international college students to proceed to become profitable.”
In the meantime, the partnerships intention to deal with the urgent demand for larger schooling in Kazakhstan, in addition to widening alternatives for home college students.
“TNE is turning into one of many nice instruments to truly ship on schooling’s nice promise … we are actually seeing it as a treatment to dramatically improve the standard of schooling and to widen entry not solely to college students in Kazakhstan but additionally to the broader area,” mentioned Nurbek.
