Looking at Kazakhstan’s Higher Education Landscape: From Transition to Transformation Between 1920 and 2015

Abstract

AbstractSince independence in 1991, the Kazakhstani government has been aggressively pursuing higher education reform. This has led to the passing of a number of education-related laws and the adaptation of different policies and practices in order to facilitate the government’s initial priority of transitioning to a market economy and more recently, to achieve its goal of becoming one of the world’s top 30 economies by the year 2050. This chapter provides an overview of Kazakhstan’s Soviet higher education legacy and the subsequent changes that the higher education sector has both undergone and continues to undergo after joining the EU’s Bologna Process in 2010. In addition to providing a historical perspective of higher education reform in the Kazakhstani context, several typologies have been provided in order to visualise the way the regulatory reforms have resulted in some institutional diversity. The chapter concludes with the challenges that the higher education sector at different levels (e.g., the national (Kazakhstani Ministry of Education and Sciences) and regional and local/institutional levels) continues to face.