INTERNATIONALIZATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN KAZAKHSTAN: INSTITUTIONAL ACHIEVEMENTS AND UNRESOLVED ASYMMETRIES

Abstract

The article examines the internationalization of higher education in Kazakhstan as a process that combines genuine institutional achievement with persistent structural asymmetry. Kazakhstan remains the only Central Asian state with full membership in the European Higher Education Area, a status it gained in March 2010 after a decade of preparatory reform, and this institutional trajectory is traced from the 1999 ratification of the Lisbon Recognition Convention through the introduction of the three-cycle degree system and into current cooperation frameworks with the European Union and China. The study draws on official statistics of the Bolashak international scholarship, TEMPUS and Erasmus+ program data, and academic literature on Bologna implementation in Kazakhstan and in the wider post-Soviet space. Particular attention is paid to a tension rarely made explicit in the celebratory literature on Kazakhstani internationalization: the scale of outbound academic mobility remains modest by regional comparison, and formal alignment with European structural parameters does not by itself guarantee a proportionate depth of research collaboration or inbound academic exchange. The article concludes that internationalization in Kazakhstan has proceeded further as an institutional and procedural alignment than as a substantive reconfiguration of research and mobility flows, a distinction with direct implications for how the next stage of reform should be designed.