At the opening ceremony of Nobel Fest in Astana on October 26, Minister of Higher Education and Science Sayasat Nurbek gave a speech on the challenges of the education system in Kazakhstan. The minister talked about Kazakhstan’s efforts to become a stable education hub in the Central Asian region and how local universities must prepare for a large influx of qualified teachers in response to the latest demographic boom in Kazakhstan.
The minister told QazMonitor how many teachers we will need in the next five years and what foreign universities are scheduled to open in Kazakhstan soon.
In your speech, you mentioned that there are 27 branches of foreign universities in Uzbekistan. Our president has set a goal to open five branches by 2025. How soon will we catch up with our neighbors?
We have already opened four branches. The task here is not really to catch up. There are certain problems when you open such a large number of universities. Our task is just to maintain quality and attract strong universities. Therefore we are now taking a very selective approach to this process.
As I said, we have opened British De Montfort University, which operates in Almaty. Two leading Russian universities - MEPhI and Gubkin - have opened their branches. The University of Arizona already has a full-fledged campus here.
Next year, we are working on this issue with Michigan State University in the pedagogical area. Its School of Education is very strong. We have a huge shortage of educators right now.
Demographics will first and foremost hit preschool and secondary education. You know, by presidential order, we are building 1,000 schools by ‘26- ‘27. But in order for these 1,000 schools to work and be functional, we need to have trained more than 100,000 teachers by that time. That's a huge number. And even the entire capacity of all our pedagogical universities will barely be enough to graduate that many teachers.
Will such many teachers help us deal with the demographic boom?
No, this is the minimum. We need to send at least a million and a half children to school.
Then what is the optimal number of teachers?
Given the current demographic and the number of schools to be built - we need about 120,000 teachers.
Because there are people retiring, the teaching profession is aging quite badly now. We need fresh young blood who will need time to get experience in the field. So, the question of improving the quality of teacher training is also a serious point on the agenda. We are now preparing a separate concept, a vision, because we are beginning to realize that, in addition, to covering the quantity of teachers, we need to equip them with completely new skills. That includes digitalization and working with parents.
The program of at least five universities is already done. What is next?
Serious negotiations are now underway (which may be too early to announce) with several British universities as well as with the Technische Universität Berlin in collaboration with D.Serikbayev East Kazakhstan Technical University in 2023-2024.
The task is to open up our educational space and “drag” strong universities here because, one, we need to raise the quality of education, and, two, we probably will not be able to cover this demographic on our own.
And that is precisely our vision. This may be the first time I have presented it publicly. If we can properly use this historic possibility, then we can reverse the flow that goes to study in Russia, Ukraine, and foreign countries by opening universities here. So the task is to begin to form this education hub slowly.