Kazakhstan to halve private universities by 2015

The number of private universities will be slashed in Kazakhstan by 2015, Tengrinews.kz reports. A public council on optimization of universities has been created in the Education and Science Ministry of Kazakhstan. The Council includes members of the Kazakhstan Parliament, presidents of universities, prominent journalists, members of Nur Otan party and different associations.

Earlier Kazakhstan Education and Science Minister Bakytzhan Zhumagulov talked about optimization of the universities in Kazakhstan. He said that each oblast would have one private university but this innovation would not touch the big cities like Shymkent, Karaganda, Almaty and Astana. Two or three universities would be left in each of the cities.

Not more than 30 universities will be left instead of the existing 66 by 2015. The main goal of the universities optimization lays in improvement of quality of education in Kazakhstan.

The Ministry of Education and Science noted that the initiative to close the universities would first of all affect the universities where material-technical base and qualification of professors would be insufficient to ensure the required quality of education services.

“We will perform the scheduled state control measures to evaluate their compliance with the requirements of the education legislation and qualification requirements. The results of the state inspection and the scheduled checks will allow the Ministry to identify the universities that do not comply with the requirements and standards set by the legislation,” the Education Ministry stated.

Students of the universities to be closed by the Ministry’s reform will be transferred to other universities.

Bakytzhan Zhumagulov also told about consolidation of public universities. The Ministry explained that every region will have only one public and one private university, i.e. the universities will be redesigned into consolidated centers of science and knowledge working to meet the requirements of the regional economies.

Members of the state council will start visiting the country’s regions to explain the mechanisms of optimization of Kazakhstan universities in the nearest time.

Tengrinews.kz