Minister eyes five-fold growth in foreign student numbers

Kazakhstan has moved at breakneck speed to increase the number of foreign students at its universities, reaching 31,500 last year – a record high. However, there are even more ambitious plans afoot which involve attracting 150,000 international students within three years, five times more than the current figure, according to Sayasat Nurbek, Kazakhstan’s minister of science and higher education.

The target was revised upwards earlier this year, when it was 100,000 foreign students by 2028, after record numbers of foreign students were enrolled in just a few years.

In a wide-ranging interview with University World News, Nurbek said the government wanted to seize the opportunity presented by the tightening up of visa policies by traditional international student destination countries. “The reason we were in such a hurry is that the window of opportunity can close at any moment,” he said, describing the opportunity to attract international students as a “once-in-a-lifetime window”.

“Canada, North America, the UK, Europe, and Australia – all of a sudden their governments decided to have stricter visa policies,” he said, noting those policies “backfired, with fewer international students going into these countries. But that might change again.”

The latest example is the United States, where the government has imposed a US$100,000 fee on the H-1B visa for skilled professionals, he noted.

But with other forces at play, such as the demographics of the Eurasian-Asian region, “there’s such a huge transnational education market forming as we speak. Think of over a billion young people living just in this [Eurasian] region – without China”.

With “a lot of mouths to feed and a lot of minds to teach”, he pointed to “constant pressure on new academic infrastructure” in many countries, “which is only growing, so we think we can grasp this growing market”.

At the same time purchasing power is going up, so the number of international students is also rising, he said, pointing to education hubs in countries such as the United Arab Emirates, where 75% of students are international students, or Qatar, where 40% of students are from overseas.

Closer to home “there's a conflict in the region, and Russia is not the preferred academic mobility centre anymore,” he said, referring to the previous outflow from Central Asian states to Russia. “For the first time in our history we have over 3,000 Russian students coming to Kazakhstan, and [another] 2,000 are Chinese. We never had anyone coming to Kazakhstan for higher education from these countries before.”

“But the [Russian] conflict might end; you never know,” he said, adding: “I’m rushing; I’m in a hurry. I push things as hard as I can because I know this window of opportunity might close at any moment.”

Branch campuses

He pointed to five standalone foreign branch campuses that have been set up in Kazakhstan and 40 partnerships between Kazakh and overseas universities offering joint programmes in less than five years. “It’s a really good result. It’s getting a lot of momentum,” he said.

Around two dozen of the 40 overseas branch universities operating together with Kazakh universities as ‘universities of excellence’ are already functioning, while a further 10 are opening this year, and six are projected for 2026.

The five full-blown branch campuses include the United Kingdom’s Cardiff University, which opened last month; Coventry University in Astana; De Montfort University in Almaty; Woosong University from South Korea, which opened in September in the country’s Turkestan region; and Italy’s Marche Polytechnic University, with plans to open a branch in Taldykorgan.

The branches were granted land and tax breaks by the government, and partnerships with private companies facilitated the construction of state-of-the-art campuses.

Others, such as the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the UK’s University of Glasgow, are based at partner institutions in Kazakhstan.

Arizona State University will be constructing two campuses, with 1,200 dormitory spaces for its branch based at M Kozybayev North Kazakhstan University, while Colorado School of Mines has announced its first overseas campus in the heart of the mining region. The Camborne School of Mines at the UK’s Exeter University is also planning a campus, according to the minister.

Referring to other education hubs, he said: “A lot of these countries have good income, or one of their major sources of income is from foreign students.”

According to Nurbek, attracting 31,500 students from overseas in 2024 contributed over 30 billion tenge (US$55.5 million) to the Kazakh economy and helped create 40,000 jobs – all part of the country’s strategy to become a “middle-tier power” in the region.

“Just the sheer branding … brought us 31,500 students,” he said.

With 700,000 local students currently in the Kazakhstan higher education system, foreign students make up just 5% of the student total. “So we still have room to grow to 150,000 students – that’ll be around 20-25% foreign students. But we are going to keep it to 30% so that we’re not very dependent [on foreign students],” he said.

“The Middle East, Russia, Pakistan, India, Vietnam and Indonesia are our big markets,” he added, noting that the results of promotional tours were very promising. “We have some good traction, for example, with Pakistan,” he said, pointing to other efforts to attract students from China, Mongolia and Azerbaijan.

The largest number of foreign students is from India, with over 12,000 students, particularly attracted to medical programmes. For the first time, students from Asia outnumbered those from the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS countries, he said.

Bottlenecks

But with such fast expansion, bottlenecks have emerged, including in the form of student accommodation.

A report by Kazakh monitoring and analytical agency EnergyProm, released in August, identified a severe shortage of student dormitories “with many new facilities being built in locations that do not address the areas of greatest need”.

On average, just under 40% of non-resident students were housed this year, but some regions fared worse.

“Even in relatively well-served areas, many students are forced to rent costly and often substandard accommodation,” the report said. It predicted the problem would become “increasingly acute” with a larger influx of students.

“Infrastructure is our largest limitation,” Nurbek acknowledged, but added: “We were able to tap into the resources of private companies” and combine this with public funding to build more. The ministry’s own figures showed a deficit of over 6,238 bed spaces in 2025.

However, the rush to Kazakhstan may slow in the future. Previously, the ministry sought out university partners “very actively”, approaching universities such as Cardiff with concrete proposals at a time when that university was experiencing financial difficulties and proposing to lay off hundreds of faculty members, and offering them generous support to set up in Kazakhstan.

Several branch campus schemes are being finalised or underway, and Kazakhstan is not reaching a “saturation point” due to the large youth population in the region. “But at this stage we won’t be so actively seeking new partnerships,” unless they are top-tier universities, among the world’s best, the minister said.

Upgrading local universities

While more than 20 regional universities in Kazakhstan receive extra funding under the Centres of Excellence Scheme to meet the demands of foreign partnerships, such as labs and other infrastructure, Nurbek acknowledged that a focus on foreign universities meant tensions with local universities were “inevitable”.

But the goal is also “to transform our public universities into research-intensive universities. So we use these partnerships to make that transformation. We are encouraging our universities to create joint masters and PhD programmes with international partners.”

Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University’s fourth global campus, and first in Kazakhstan, in partnership with Zhubanov University, is offering mainly engineering degrees.

“They now have an obligation to transform the local partner university into an international research-intensive university, and we run what we call the faculty development programme. So, we create split PhD programmes and split masters programmes,” taught jointly by the two universities, to “share some of that financial burden”.

Funds for Kazakhstan’s Bolashak Scholarship Programme, which supports generous scholarships for Kazakh students to go abroad with funding for the entire programme, are being redirected from next year to make funds available for Kazakh students to study at partner universities abroad as part of the joint masters or PhD.

“A certain number of Bolashak scholarships will be diverted to help these ‘faculty development programmes’ and do more with the same money.” Students will be able to spend a year with the partner university abroad with Bolashak funding, he said.

“We can make sure our partners train enough PhDs under their supervision, controlling the quality, so that they can eventually become first junior faculty, then senior faculty in their branch campuses [in Kazakhstan].”

“It is a very efficient tool to build this integration between local universities and the foreign partners we have,” he said.
“It is most likely that partner universities use these split degree programmes for research collaborations and for faculty development.

“We will use this funding tool to launch as many of these great PhD programmes as possible,” he added.