Career Decisions of School Graduates in Kazakhstan

Abstract

This paper will focus on the impact of state educational grants in Kazakhstan on the education and career choices of graduates and how social, economic, and institutional contexts interact with grant incentive programs. Based on a qualitative design, we organized semi-structured interviews with 46 respondents (recent graduates and teachers) and analyzed them using template analysis in NVivo. The analysis was guided by eight codes: grant-driven choice, personal interest, family influence, teacher support, socioeconomic constraints, information and institutional context, career mismatch and career guidance system. The results show that grants are enablers of access as well as inhibitors of perceived choices. Among numerous graduates, tight household budgets and a lack of certainty in the cost of tuition made eligibility for grants the first filtering decision, and it crowds out prior interests. This was the dynamic that was mostly enhanced by family expectations and risk avoidance that encouraged safe fields that were perceived to be stable or prestigious. Earlier exploration may be countered with pressure by teacher support and school guidance about the rules of admission, projecting expectations based on exam scores, and encouraging earlier exploration. Nevertheless, the rushed decisions and wrong fits between interests and majors enrolled were caused by late or incomplete information about quotas, deadlines, and program requirements. The paper recommends that enhancing transparency, timeliness and usability of information on grants and admissions and both better counselling and better labour-market signalling might help lower the mismatch and enable more deliberate choices. Policy recommendations include earlier outreach, direct advice to poor students and better communication of alternate paths, such as the availability of international scholarships. These measures can increase the equity and reinforce the compatibility between education preferences and student choices. The evidence that is presented in the paper are used to inform grant policy and school guidance, but the results are context-specific and not statistically generalizable.