In his annual address to the nation, President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan pledged that despite economic difficulties and falling oil prices, the government will fund all its education programs and ambitious initiatives in the field of higher education, and even increase teachers' salaries by 25 percent in 2009. These steps are in sharp contrast to the practice in many CIS countries, where education spending traditionally is the first to be cut in times of economic slowdown. But will Kazakhstan’s ambitious education reforms withstand these difficult times intact?
BACKGROUND: Kazakhstan’s higher education system has undergone serious changes during the last decade, as the government increased its education budget seven-fold between 1999 and 2009, achieving the highest education spending in the Central Asian region in absolute terms. The spending was fueled by rapidly rising energy export revenues and reached an equivalent of about US$4.7 billion in the 2008 fiscal year. The State Program on Development of Education until 2010 (SPDE-2010) envisioned ambitious goals, including an increase in student enrollment from 73,800 in 2001 to about 180,000 in 2008, gradual decentralization of the higher education system, introduction of a western-style credit system, improvement of education standards, and an increase in international cooperation in the field of education.
Important among these changes were reforms in the evaluation and reward system and in salary scales, and introduction of a U.S.-style research grant system in order to encourage innovative research and development (R&D) at national universities. These reforms addressed the most painful legacy of the transitional reforms in the 1990s – chronic under-funding and neglect of the education system. For nearly a decade after 1991, most educators and education administrators were paid notoriously low wages and on many occasions their salaries arrived two or three months late. The low salaries and falling social status of teachers diverted young and bright graduates away from a career path in education; according to official reports, only one in 100 PhD graduates accepted jobs in the education and R&D fields. In addition, many highly experienced and qualified educators left the profession, haunted by poverty and deteriorating economic conditions. Many lecturers had no choice but to supplement their meager salaries by working part-time in the private sector, engaging in private tutoring or in extreme cases accepting bribes in exchange for higher grading of students.
The positive social and economic climate of the last decade (1999-2009) allowed many problems that Kazakhstan's education had faced in the 1990s to be addressed, and much needed structural changes in the education system to be introduced. Practically all universities received access to the Internet and modern communication technologies, and funds to equip computer classes and to expand university libraries; for example, in 2008 the Kazakh National University (KazNU) alone received about 1.2 billion tenge (10 million US$) for the renovation and IT equipment purchases, and an additional 6.2 billion tenge for new constructions in the KazNU campus. Importantly, the country experimented with the introduction of a three-cycle education structure – bachelor, masters, and doctorate programs – and pledged further reforms aligned with the Bologna Process concept. In addition, for several years the government has been funding invitations to foreign faculties to several flagship national universities and expanding its state-funded study-abroad program Bolashak from 300 (in 2000) to 3,000 (in 2008) students a year. Recently, the government announced the even more far-reaching SPDE-2020, committing itself to equip Kazakhstan’s education system to meet internationally competitive standards.
IMPLICATIONS: The world economic crisis and the financial meltdown in Kazakhstan in 2008 negatively affected the country’s ability of the country to fund and reform many public programs, including education. Kazakhstan's financial sector was particularly vulnerable to the crisis as during the early 2000s, many of Kazakhstan’s banks adopted U.S.-style risk-taking and invested heavily in real estate – both domestically and in the CIS as a whole. As the real estate sector tanked in 2007 and 2008, many private borrowers and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) experienced difficulties in repaying their loans. The country’s entire banking system was on the verge of collapse and only a massive multi-billion dollar bailout by the government brought some sense of stability. Nonetheless, economic growth has definitely slowed down, and with it, spending on many state-run programs.
In the era of globalization, no country can be safe from exposure to international crises and global recession, but it is small and medium countries that usually pay the full price for the mistakes of big players. As in many countries around the world, education in Kazakhstan is among the first sectors to have been hit particularly hard, experiencing pressures on many fronts. First, there is a significant pressure to cut funding for some of state education programs and to downsize subsidies for R&D, although so far the government has resisted such measures and promised to fund salary hikes in both 2009 and 2010. Second, there is considerable pressure on the reform efforts, as government and public attention is diverted to other pressing issues related to the economic problems, and education reformers receive less high-profile support in their efforts to keep the reforms rolling. Third, there is pressure on poor and even middle-class families to slash education spending on their offspring, a move that would inevitably hurt all 140 universities across the country, but especially the small, tuition-dependent universities. True, according to the Constitution, higher education is still free for the citizens of Kazakhstan, but the government fully funds only one-fifth of the country’s students every year and the remaining students have to look for other funding sources or pay from their own pockets. Most families have to fund the education of their sons and daughters from their family budgets, if their children for any of various reasons are unable to get the highest scores in the Unified National Test (UNT). Even those students who receive full tuition funding from the state need substantial support from their families in order to cover living expenses. Fourth, there is strong pressure on private companies and corporations, which due to the financial meltdown have less money to spend on training and retraining purposes and on funding R&D and the education of their staff members.
CONCLUSIONS: International experience, particularly the experience of industrialized western countries, suggests that in a period of economic difficulties, education is often a solution for retraining for new jobs or a temporary refuge to steer the turbulence in the labor market. As labor market conditions change due to technological changes, industrial restructuring, globalization or economic recession, workers can indeed improve their position in the market by acquiring new skills and knowledge or changing profession altogether. In the market economy, the labor market is often deregulated and it is vital for workers to stay competitive. Unfortunately, the Kazakh colleges and universities lack the flexibility and independence to quickly respond to the rapidly changing labor market environment and demands in the emerging sectors of the economy.
Therefore, the Kazakh government should give the national universities more freedom in introducing new courses and new curricula and in planning and spending their budgets. Second, not only should it focus on increasing the number of undergraduate and graduate programs but also on short-term training and retraining and professional development programs. Third, the universities should also adjust to the changing environment by developing and strengthening their career centers, career-development departments and counseling services to provide assistance to workers who decide to change their career path due to layoffs or new job opportunities, or for other reasons.
AUTHORS’ BIO: Rafis Abazov, PhD, is an adjunct Assistant Professor at the Harriman Institute/SIPA at the Columbia University (New York). He is the author of The Culture and Customs of the Central Asian Republics (2007) and the Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of Central Asia (2008). In 2008 he traveled to Kazakhstan to research education reforms in the country. Galiya Ibrayeva, PhD, is Dean of the School of Journalism at the Kazakh National University (Almaty). She is the author of Mass Media and Society (2000).