APAC Supplement
Space to grow in Kazakhstan
With foreign universities, new AI infrastructure and rising student numbers, Kazakhstan is positioning itself as a higher education hub for Eurasia. The challenge is making that growth work for the whole country.
By Nick Harland
15 October 2026
In brief
- Kazakhstan is expanding foreign branch campuses and tech infrastructure to establish itself as Eurasia's primary higher education hub.
- International partnerships and AI investments are driving rising student retention alongside record growth in international enrolments.
- Long-term success requires spreading growth beyond major cities, easing regulations and building lasting local research capacity.
The first thing you should know about Kazakhstan is that it is big. So big, in fact, that you could fit about five Frances, 11 United Kingdoms or 30 Portugals inside the country. It’s the largest landlocked nation in the world and lies at the almost-exact centre of Eurasia. Simply put, it’s a very big country in a very convenient location.
While interesting geographical bits of trivia, they have an impact on the country’s higher education sector. For one, the country’s central location plays a central role in its higher education strategy. Being as well-connected with Berlin as it is with Beijing means Kazakhstan is positioning itself as an education hub for Eurasia, connecting East and West and attracting students from across the region.
A key tenet of this strategy is to attract foreign universities to set up branch campuses in the country. The idea is that the knowledge, quality of teaching and international links brought by foreign universities can propel Kazakhstan’s own higher education ambitions.
Bringing international education home
Leicester’s De Montfort University (DMU) was the first UK university to set up in Kazakhstan, opening its Almaty campus in 2021.
“We saw Kazakhstan as a particularly interesting opportunity to widen access to UK higher education in Central Asia,” explains Neil Hart, the school’s Associate Director of Transnational Education.
“There was already clear demand among local students and families for high-quality international education, but studying overseas is not an option for everyone. Establishing provision in Kazakhstan enabled students to study for a UK degree in their home country while also having opportunities to engage with the wider DMU community and, where appropriate, study in Leicester.”
DMU Kazakhstan’s first cohort was made up of 145 students, mainly studying business-related subjects. Since then, the university has added new courses in computing, international relations, and art and design. Last October, DMU Kazakhstan celebrated its first cohort of graduates. These are all promising early signs for a university that has also established similarly successful operations in Dubai and Cambodia.
“For DMU, the experience has reinforced that successful transnational education needs to be more than simply exporting a UK degree,” says Hart. “It requires programmes to remain academically rigorous and recognisably British while being relevant to the economic, cultural and employment context of the country in which students are studying.”
Though DMU was the first British university to open a campus in Kazakhstan, it’s not the biggest provider of transnational education in the country. Coventry University launched an Astana campus in 2024, followed by a second in Almaty earlier this year.
For Miras Daulenov, President of Coventry University Kazakhstan, one of their main challenges is attracting young Kazakhs who often favour studying abroad.
Daulenov quotes figures from UNESCO, which state that Kazakhstan is among the top 10 countries in the world for the number of students studying abroad per 100,000 people and among the top 15 in absolute numbers. "We're not saying that studying abroad is wrong,” he says. “I studied abroad and represent a British university in Kazakhstan."
But he believes it's important to retain local students if the country wants to meet its ambition of becoming world leaders in areas such as AI. The ambition is not simply to bring foreign universities into Kazakhstan, but to give more young people a reason to build their futures there.
As it happens, those AI ambitions are also influenced by the country’s geography. AI is a target industry for the country partly because Kazakhstan has the space to build new data centres.
Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov has said that the country's goal is to become “a platform for hosting global digital infrastructure”, and work has already begun on Data Center Valley, a massive AI campus that is set to cover 1,400 hectares — roughly the equivalent of 2,000 football pitches. The project includes a $10 billion deal with US-based AI company Firebird, backed by NVIDIA.
Promisingly, it seems that the country is starting to persuade more local students to study locally. Domestic student numbers have grown by 14 percent in the last three years, whilst Coventry now has more than 850 students across its two Kazakh campuses — a ten-fold increase from 2024, when it enrolled just 84 students at its Astana campus. “To be honest, we expected 800 students in 10 years, but we reached that goal very quickly,” says Daulenov.
Funding growth and widening access
The success that these institutions have had so far has been helped by generous private and public investment. Daulenov says that Coventry has received around $300,000 in sponsorship fees from local employers, whilst 200 scholarships are available every year for high-achieving students.
Two years ago, 750 people applied for those 200 scholarships. In the most recent academic year, there were over 1,000 applications. But Daulenov cautions that it’s important to strike the right balance between scholarship and non-scholarship students (the split currently stands at 44/56). "We cannot be dependent on them,” he says.
Meanwhile, Kazakhstan also allocated more than 75,000 state-funded educational grants for the 2026-27 academic year, largely geared towards fields tied to national workforce needs including engineering, information technology, natural sciences and teacher education.
Yet while growth this strong is broadly a good thing, it is mostly concentrated in the country’s main population centres, Astana and Almaty, where around two-thirds of all university students reside. And in a vast country like Kazakhstan, Daulenov illustrates why ensuring countrywide access to higher education is so important.
"When I worked for the Ministry, we established the University of Arizona's first double degree programme in the country — funded by the government — in Petropavlovsk [in northern Kazakhstan],” he says.
Previously, most young people from this region elected to study in nearby Russia. "But after we established the University of Arizona in Petropavlovsk, we retained 68 percent of students from schools."
Jenny Lee is the University of Arizona’s Chief International Affairs Officer and Dean of International Education. She says that the school’s decision to establish a microcampus in Kazakhstan was mainly driven by “aligned strategic interests”.
“Northern Kazakhstan is a major agricultural region, while the University of Arizona, as a land-grant university, has strong scientific expertise in agriculture, water resource management, biotechnology and engineering,” she explains.
The university’s partnership with Kozybayev University was established in 2021, with the first dual-degree students enrolled in 2022. Today, 475 students undertake those dual-degree programmes, up from 43 in the first year. Lee says that their partnership is proof that international collaboration can also thrive at regional universities “by creating new academic and research opportunities outside the major cities”.
She adds that “students have come from every oblast of Kazakhstan to enrol in our dual-degree program”.
The example suggests that internationalisation need not be confined to the country’s main urban centres. By matching overseas universities’ expertise with regional needs, Kazakhstan can expand educational opportunities while building local research capacity.
Becoming a regional education hub
While foreign universities are helping to persuade more young Kazakhs to study in the country, the government’s wider internationalisation strategy is propelling international student numbers. These ambitions are buoyed by a wider range of English-taught programmes, an affordable cost of living and the country’s convenient central location.
The country's international student population topped 35,075 in 2025, an increase of 11percent from the previous year. Hart from DMU expects that trajectory to continue in the coming years.
“The present direction of travel is very clear. Kazakhstan wants to establish itself as a regional education hub, increase the number of international students studying in the country and deepen relationships with overseas universities,” he says.
“If the current trajectory continues, Kazakhstan has the potential to become an increasingly significant higher education centre for Central Asia: retaining more Kazakh students who might previously have studied overseas, while simultaneously attracting a larger population of international students into the country.”
As for Daulenov, he cites the challenge of attracting more international faculty and the removal of “administrative barriers” for foreign universities as key priorities if the country’s higher education sector is to continue growing. Rules governing foreign universities were relaxed in 2026 to make it easier for them to establish campuses in Kazakhstan.
However, he believes that growth through internationalisation will not come by only attracting more foreign universities to the country.
"I think growth will happen by virtue of the [greater number of] programmes and courses taught in English,” he says. English-taught programmes are growing in number, but from a low starting point.
So far, however, the signs are good for Kazakhstan’s expanding higher education sector. The QS World University Rankings 2027 include 18 Kazakhstani universities, four more than in 2022. Of those institutions, two feature in the global top 400 and one (Farabi University) is in the top 200. It has more universities in the list than any other Central Asian nation, and the 11th-most in Asia.
How much room is there to grow?
Growth is clearly at the heart of Kazakhstan’s higher education ambitions as the government aims to attract 150,000 international students by 2029.
The country has several advantages: a strategic location, growing international partnerships, public investment and a rising profile in global rankings.
The next stage will depend on more than the number of campuses opened or students enrolled. Kazakhstan will need to ensure that international partnerships deliver lasting academic and research benefits, that more students can access opportunities outside its largest cities, and that its universities can attract the talent needed to support the country’s economic ambitions.
MEET THE AUTHOR
Nick is a freelance copywriter, writer and founder of Big Bang Copy. As a freelancer, he has written content for Specsavers, Numan, Ricoh, Hearst and many more. He specialises in education, healthcare and music, but has written about everything from financial services to luxury travel. In 2021, he founded the copywriting agency Big Bang Copy. He works with a small network of freelancers on bigger copywriting projects such as website rewrites or marketing campaigns.