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Abstract

Drawing on Olsen’s (2007) institutional dynamics and Christiansen and Lægreid’s (2001) public sector reform frameworks, this paper examines how higher education reforms in Kazakhstan are understood, negotiated, and implemented from the perspective of national-level policymakers. While much of the existing literature on higher education reform focuses on institutional or faculty-level experiences, this study recenters analysis on policymakers as key actors shaping reform trajectories, priorities, and constraints in a highly centralized system.

The study adopts a qualitative case study design (Yin, 2014), based on in-depth interviews with eleven senior policymakers, including former Ministers and Vice Ministers of Education and senior officials and departments’ heads at the Ministry. By foregrounding policymaker narratives, the paper explores how reforms are conceptualized at the system level and how policy intentions interact with entrenched governance structures, legal frameworks and institutional realities.

Findings reveal a persistent tension between Kazakhstan’s ambition to build a globally competitive and innovation-driven higher education system and the enduring legacy of centralized, hierarchical governance rooted in the Soviet past. Policymakers themselves acknowledge that reform implementation is constrained not only by institutional resistance within universities, but also by bureaucratic inertia and risk-averse decision-making within government structures. This dual constraint highlights that barriers to reform are not confined to the institutional level but are embedded within the policy apparatus itself.

Furthermore, policymakers point to significant regional disparities that shape uneven reform outcomes, particularly in regional universities facing infrastructural limitations and difficulties in attracting qualified academic and managerial staff. These insights complicate dominant reform narratives by showing how national policies are mediated, adapted, and sometimes diluted across different local contexts.

The paper argues that understanding reform implementation in post-Soviet contexts requires closer attention to policymakers’ perspectives, as they play a critical role in both enabling and constraining change. The findings highlight a fundamental tension between the normative ideal of participatory, context-sensitive governance and the prevailing state-driven, top-down reform model. This tension raises important questions about the long-term sustainability and effectiveness of recent reforms, including large-scale initiatives such as the expansion of international branch campuses. By centering policymakers as agents of reform, this study contributes to global debates on higher education change by offering empirical insights from a non-Western, post-Soviet context, and by rethinking where agency and constraint are located in reform processes.

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Abstract

The transition from secondary education to university is widely recognised as a critical yet

unevenly supported stage in students’ academic trajectories. In Uzbekistan, many students enter higher education after achieving strong results in an exam-oriented school system, only to encounter unexpected academic and institutional challenges in their first year. This study opens the “black box” of first-year transition in Uzbekistan’s higher education system by examining how early student difficulties emerge not from individual unpreparedness, but from the pedagogical and institutional conditions under which transition unfolds. Drawing on qualitative interviews and reflective student accounts, the findings show that early academic difficulty is a predictable outcome of misalignment between the forms of competence cultivated and rewarded in school and those assumed and recognised at university. Viewed in this light, higher education reforms aimed at modernisation and expansion can be understood as having opened a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences, where institutional repositioning has outpaced attention to the everyday pedagogical work required to support student transition. By foregrounding student experience in an underexplored Central Asian context, this paper contributes to scholarship of teaching and learning debates that position transition as a pedagogical responsibility rather than an individual burden, highlighting the need for more explicit, contextually grounded approaches to first-year transition that resonate beyond Uzbekistan in rapidly reforming higher education systems.