President Nazarbayev visited Education City yesterday, Qatar Foundation’s ‘landmark’ tertiary education edifice. Reportedly, the president was impressed by the quality of the institution and announced that a delegation would visit Qatar soon to study more carefully the approach the Foundation has taken. It provided the small Gulf state with a centre of excellence that has attracted numerous big international names such as Cornell and Georgetown to open campuses in the outskirts of Doha.

In Nazarbayev’s recent annual address to the people of Kazakhstan, he stressed the importance of educational reform and its central position to all strategies of economic development and diversification away from oil. KZBlog reported about the amusing and Soviet-like character of the speech’s passage:

In charging in the government with improving and modernizing the educational system of Kazakhstan, so that a person with a Kazakhstan diploma can work anywhere in the world, he said in Kazakh, if we don’t do this, our universities will keep selling diplomas and making rectors rich–a shot at the system of corruption which is found in universities where professors and rectors accept bribes for passing grades. In discussing the need for educated and qualified workers, he turned to the Minister of Labor and Social Protection and said, I am addressing you personally. We are paying people and if they can’t do the work, what are we paying them for? Look into this area of unqualified workers.

Eurasianet carried a report recently which mostly let the KIMEP faculty comment on the deplorable state of the system, focusing heavily on corruption and cheating. KIMEP is the “landmark” of Kazakh higher education, run in an American style while relying heavily on Western faculty and modern learning techniques (but in Kazakhstan, not even the best universities do without proper scandals…).

Now, how is the Kazakh government going to tackle the problem of an inadequate education sector? Nazarbayev promised to build 100 new schools and “called for a system to assess teaching and learning and a method to accredit educational institutions in line with international standards”.

In connection with yesterday’s Qatar visit, one would assume that Nazarbayev prefers central solutions, maybe even the foundation of prestige objects like the Qatari Education City. Whether this will translate into more “landmark” universities to be built in a few cities across Kazakhstan or whether it will include vocational schools and more advanced research facilities* is still unknown.

“Excellence” like the Education City in Qatar is a discussion of a somewhat different league when the basic problems Kazakhstan faces are considered (such as corruption and a Soviet non-critical approach to tertiary education). Problems recently highlighted on this blog but not successfully tackled as of yet include issues such as regional aspects of educational policies (e.g. that oblasts are required to pay for vocational training, the quality of which might arguably be even more important in the mid-term than highly-skilled university graduates).

Previous coverage on this on neweurasia:
- Quantity vs. Quality - Education in Kazakhstan (October 2006)
- Education Spending Boost (May 2006)
- Kazakhstan’s R&D Spending Spree (October 2006)
- A Dutch Disease (January 2006)

*On this, a wonderful resource is Science and Technology in Kazakhstan: Current Status and Future Prospects (2007), Development, Security, and Cooperation (DSC).