‘Islands of internationalisation’ risk as central Asian hubs grow

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have been warned that bringing in foreign universities does not always strengthen a region’s wider education system as both countries continue to expand their international partnerships.

Central Asia has emerged as a new hub for international universities in recent years through joint programmes, partnerships and branch campuses.

The Kazakhstan government has reported that it had 40 strategic partnerships with leading foreign universities by the end of 2025, including 33 international university branch campuses. Most recently, it deepened ties with Japan and South Korea via the launch of dual-degree programmes in areas such as information security and artificial intelligence.

In the 2025-26 academic year, Kazakhstan hosted 35,075 international students from 88 countries, and it plans to host 100,000 international students by 2029.

There were 32 foreign universities operating in Uzbekistan by the end of 2025. Between January and June of this year, a total of 21,042 foreign students arrived in the country.

Maia Chankseliani, professor of comparative and international education at the University of Oxford, said that both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were “being very deliberate” about internationalisation, adding that Kazakhstan has “a longer history of using international partnerships to reform its own higher education system”.

Chankseliani cited Nazarbayev University in the north of Kazakhstan as an example. The university opened in 2010 and was built through partnerships with leading UK and US institutions, including the University of Cambridge and UCL. “Today’s push to attract foreign universities builds on an earlier Kazakh strategy of bringing international expertise into the domestic system,” Chankseliani remarked.

Yerbol Suleimenov, an international higher education consultant based in Kazakhstan, agreed with Chankseliani that Kazakhstan “has a first-mover advantage”.

“Uzbekistan, however, has a much larger domestic market and is moving very quickly. Its recent policy signals suggest that it wants to accelerate partnerships with highly ranked universities and use a much wider range of models, not only traditional branch campuses.”

Both countries are seeking the same things through their global expansion, according to Chankseliani: “reputable international universities, international students, talented academics, research partnerships”. However, questions remain over whether their internationalisation ambitions are boosting domestic systems.

Bringing in an international university “does not automatically strengthen the wider system”, Chankseliani cautioned.

“The crucial question is what happens around the foreign university. Are local academics involved in developing curricula and research? Are they gaining opportunities to work with international colleagues? Are local universities developing stronger teaching and research ecosystems? Are research relationships being created? And, five or 10 years later, is there capability in the domestic system that wasn’t there before?

“There is a danger of creating islands of international provision: institutions with a prestigious foreign name, teaching largely local students, but with relatively weak connections to the surrounding university system,” said Chankseliani.

Amid the internationalisation push, the task ahead for both governments is to ensure that local universities are not weakened by losing out on students, faculty or research capacity. “Importing a university brand is relatively easy. Embedding its quality and institutional culture into the domestic system is much harder,” said Suleimenov.

While an element of competition between the two countries certainly exists, both experts said there is scope for cross-border collaboration and shared research partnerships between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, particularly as demand for higher education across the region grows and the mobility patterns of students across central Asia evolve.

“For many years, when we talked about international student mobility in central Asia, we largely talked about students leaving the region. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are now trying to change that geography. They want international education to come to central Asia, and increasingly they want international students to come as well,” said Chankseliani.

“Central Asia is moving from being primarily an exporter of students to becoming a destination for international higher education itself,” Suleimenov agreed.

rosalind.skillen@timeshighereducation.com