Institutional Strategies of Higher Education Reform in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan: Differentiating to Survive Between State and Market

Abstract

Between 1991 and today, the Soviet system of state-funded and Communist Party controlled higher education institutions (HEIs) in Kyrgyzstan has been transformed into an expansive, diverse, unequal, semiprivatized and marketized higher education landscape. Drawing on national and international indicators of higher education in Kyrgyzstan and data about the history and substance of these changes in policy and legislation, this chapter examines key factors which have shaped patterns of institutional differentiation and diversification during this period. These include the historical legacies of Soviet educational infrastructures, new legal and political frameworks for HE governance and finance, changes to regulations for the licensing of institutions and academic credentials, the introduction of multinational policy agendas for higher education in the Central Asian region, changes in the relationship between higher education and labor, the introduction of a national university admissions examination, and the adoption of certain principles of the European Bologna Process. The picture of HE reform that emerges from this analysis is one in which concurrent processes of diversification and homogenization are not driven wholly by either state regulation or forces of market competition, but mediated by universities’ strategic negotiations of these forces in the context of historical institutional formations in Kyrgyzstan.