EurasiaNet: KAZAKHSTAN: ECONOMIC CRISIS CRIMPS ASTANA’S GRAND PLANS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
Kazakhstan’s higher education system is taking a battering from the global financial crisis, jeopardizing Astana’s ambitious plans to turn the country into an Asian tiger economy. Thousands of young people face expulsion from universities as they find themselves unable to pay tuition and fees. The government has moved to quell public outcry by fast-tracking measures to assist financially-strapped students.
There are wider implications: problems in higher education could jeopardize President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s key priorities of transforming Kazakhstan into a knowledge economy, turning the country trilingual and making it one of the world’s 50 most competitive countries (Kazakhstan ranks 66th in the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report 2008-2009).
Follow
{ 1 comment }
An excellent summary account of current situation in higher education in Kazakhstan.
This particular problem has more profound roots and has been there for a while. Financial crisis just exacerbated it.
As a citizen and resident of Kazakhstan, I know that cost of higher education is almost comparable to that of North America with GDP per capita many times lower than that of the US and Canada. For the overwhelming majority of the population, higher education is unaffrodable.
Comments on this entry are closed.