Quality of education in Kazakhstani universities: real or not real?

Abstract

The quality of education in the sector of higher education has been one of the key priorities of the government for the last decade. In order to assure the quality of education and produce highly qualified human resources, the country needs to have an effective tool for assessing the activities of higher education institutions. Successful international experiences and the need to integrate into the European Higher Education Area urged Kazakhstan to introduce the procedure of external accreditation by independent quality assurance agencies. To understand the effectiveness of the external accreditation in the framework of Kazakhstani context, there is a need to contemplate the issues of the general concept of quality, overall procedure of quality assurance as well as its strong and weak points. While there are ongoing debates about the efficiency of quality assurance agencies and their impact on quality of education, it is important to realize that the internal quality within universities cannot be assured by the means of external review alone. In summary, this article argues that the process of assuring the quality of education in Kazakhstani institutions has to be a cooperative attempt of both quality assurance agencies and educational organizations. Therefore, the culture of quality and attitudes of society, policy-makers and universities towards quality assurance agencies is an important issue for discussion.