Uzbekistan is not a country that intrudes on western consciousness very much. If people think of Uzbekistan at all, they tend to think of it for its past glories. Perhaps they know a little bit about for the Silk Road cities of Tashkent and Bokhara, or the brilliant city of Samarkand, whose Registan and grand Observatory, built by the Scientist-King Ulugh Beg, briefly made the region the world’s centre of astronomy and mathematics in the early fifteenth-century.
But since the silk road declined in importance, Central Asia has become a bit of an economic backwater. And after the disappearance of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan had to deal with economic and environmental catastrophes (the disappearing Aral Sea lies mostly in Uzbek territory) and an authoritarian post-Soviet government which worried about political stability so much that it limited access to higher education so as to avoid sources of unrest
And then in the middle of the 2010s, Uzbekistan suddenly decided to embark on one of the biggest human capital catch-up exercises the world has ever seen. Thanks to a booming youth population, rising secondary completion rates, and a growing economy, there was huge demand for higher education. In the last decade, the higher education system expanded by five-fold. Many new foreign universities were invited into the country to help raise standards and accommodate booming demand. A private university system has arisen basically from scratch in just the last eight years. It is, in short, one of the most amazing stories of growth and turn-around in global higher education in the past decade.
With me today to discuss all of this is Komiljon Karimov. He’s the Rector of Westminster International University in Tashkent and also spent three years as First Deputy Minister of the Minister of Higher Education, Science and innovation of the Republic of Uzbekistan, and has had an almost unparalleled view of the changes that have been wrought in Uzbek higher education over the past decade. We jammed a lot into this discussion, but what was mot interesting for me was Komiljon’s assertion that quality assurance – always a tall order in a system growing as fast as Uzbekistan’s – had to be driven first and foremost by institutional autonomy. I really wish I heard that more often.
But enough from me, over to Komiljon.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 4.18 | Uzbekistan’s Higher Education Boom
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Komiljon, let’s set the stage here a little bit. In the Soviet period, and right up to maybe 15 years ago, Uzbekistan was fairly underdeveloped in terms of higher education: low enrolment rates, not much in terms of scientific output. Why was that? Was it simply a matter of economic underdevelopment, or were there other factors at work?
Komiljon Karimov (KK): Alex, I think—if we talk about the Uzbekistan higher education system during the Soviet time and the first decades after independence—it’s important to avoid judging it by today’s standards. First of all, what I should say is that Uzbekistan’s education and research traditions are deeply rooted in our history, right? But of course, for the sake of saving time, we’re not going to dive deeply into history.
But as you’re asking about the Soviet period and the first years after independence, we should say that the system was not designed—both the Soviet one and what we inherited from it—to be mass higher education. It was deliberately selective, tightly aligned with a planned economy, and it was also highly specialized higher education. That doesn’t mean it was bad. In terms of the output it produced, it probably served its purpose at that time.
I wouldn’t say that it was underdeveloped, really. It was well developed, I think. In fact, Uzbekistan—even during the Soviet time—was kind of a centre in terms of education and research, at least for Central Asia. But of course, you cannot really judge it by current standards in terms of scientific output, because papers were not published in English. They were highly applied and served the needs of that period.
Right after independence, especially in the first years of the 1990s, there was a severe crisis in the economy and public finances, and that obviously impacted education overall, and higher education in particular. There was a sharp decline in enrolment in higher education, and scientific output was not rewarded in the way it is in global research systems today. There was a significant decline in that period of time, I would argue.
AU: But then in the early 2000s—really the mid-2010s—the country gets a new president, Mr. Mirziyoyev. Is that the spark for a change in thinking about higher education? Was this a political change, or was it more a response to the fact that there were a lot of new students coming along because of a big demographic wave of youth from about 2015 onwards?
KK: No, that point in our history was a turning point—not just for education, but for the overall transformation of the country. Until the mid-2010s, that period of our history, the country was in fact quite closed, I would say, in many terms. In terms of the economy, in terms of interaction with the outside world.
With the new leadership of the country, as I said, it really was a turning point in our history. And of course, higher education was very much impacted. But this was part of a broader transformation of the state.
Higher education reform was part of that shift. This was not just a change in educational philosophy. I would argue it was a much more general rethinking of economic and social development.
AU: What about demographics? Because Central Asia is quite different from the rest of the former Soviet Union. In those countries, you saw birth rates falling in the 1990s and then never really coming back. Whereas in Uzbekistan, and I guess a couple of other Central Asian states, you had a very strong demographic bounce back around 2000. So there’s this big wave of students coming into the system now. Is that about right?
KK: Absolutely, absolutely. Demographics are one of the unique features of this country. If you look at the data from before independence, or when we just gained independence in 1991, the population of Uzbekistan was around 18 million. In the last 34 years, it has more than doubled.
Now we’re close to a 40-million-person nation. Population growth has been steady—around 2.3 to 2.5 percent annually—and it never really fell below those figures. In the last two or three years, we’ve seen a tendency toward stabilization. There’s no very sharp increase anymore, but there is still growth, at around 2 percent annually.
So yes, demographics play a key role, obviously, in this sector.
AU: So I’m not sure any country in the world has ever scaled up its higher education system that quickly. Even China, at the peak of its growth, wasn’t that fast. That must be incredibly difficult. Was that planned, or was it just an explosion of pent-up demand? How do you deal with an influx of that size? What are the big bottlenecks?
KK: You’re right. If we compare the data from 2017—when the new higher education reform agenda was set—to what we have now, enrolment in higher education increased from about 9 percent to around 42 percent. So almost a 500 percent increase, as you said. In absolute numbers, it’s even bigger.
We went from around 250,000 students in higher education to about 1.5 million right now. That’s roughly a sixfold increase in the student population. Imagine that. And of course, you can’t say it was a chaotic explosion. No—it was planned.
What I always tell my colleagues is that what we have in Uzbekistan’s higher education sector is actually guided by a strategic plan. In 2020, the government adopted a strategy for higher education sector development. It’s a ten-year plan up to 2030. If you look at the targets in that plan, you’ll see that the country stated, quite boldly, its ambitions in terms of student enrolment.
The target is to reach 50 percent enrolment in higher education by 2030. We’re already at around 42 percent, with five years to go, so I’m confident we’re on track.
So the short answer is: yes, it was planned. But of course there are bottlenecks. You can imagine, with such explosive growth, there are important issues that need to be addressed. One is the quality of provision. Another is the regulatory and legal framework, because it’s not just about numbers—it’s also about the diversity of providers. And of course, there’s the capacity of teaching staff. All of these are important bottlenecks.
AU: And how has this growth been financed? I mean, this is expensive. This isn’t cheap, what you’ve done. So has it all been financed by government, or have students been asked to contribute more through tuition fees? Where does the money come from?
KK: Yes, of course expansion on this scale is expensive, and Uzbekistan adopted what I would call a mixed financing model. The state has remained the primary funder, particularly for infrastructure in public universities. But students and their parents, or other sponsors, have also begun to contribute more through tuition fees.
This wasn’t simply privatization. I would say it was a form of cost sharing, designed to make the system financially stable. Tuition has become a component, but what’s important here is the diversity of providers. We still have a large number of public universities, but the state has also supported the development of private providers, as well as international branch campuses.
So it’s a mixture of different providers, and they bring with them different financing approaches. But to give a short answer: yes, students and their families are contributing more toward education than they did before.
What’s also important to say is that, while we talk about numbers, the government has had a very deliberate policy to support those who need it most. Disadvantaged students from poorer backgrounds are supported through scholarships. And female students, in particular at the postgraduate level, now study for free in Uzbekistan. This has resulted in about 70 percent of postgraduate students being female. Their studies are fully government-funded.
So the government is now targeting support to those who need it most.
AU: Komiljon, I want to pick up on the points you made about new institutional forms and new sectors in Uzbekistan. I read recently that Uzbekistan is now the third-largest host of international branch campuses.
That’s an interesting development—and of course, you are the president of one international institution, Westminster International University in Tashkent. How did the government go about integrating international campuses into a national strategy? And were there particular types of institutions the country was trying to attract?
KK: Yes. First of all, what I should say is that the presence of many international branch campuses, as you just mentioned, is very much a deliberate policy choice for Uzbekistan. Again, if you look at the strategy I mentioned earlier, you’ll see that the ambition is to establish Uzbekistan as a regional higher education hub—to attract more international transnational education providers, and as a result, more international students and researchers to the country.
These institutions have allowed Uzbekistan to expand capacity quickly, while also importing academic standards, curricular models, and governance models, which I think is quite important. They also serve a signalling function to the rest of the world—that Uzbekistan is open, reform-oriented, and serious about quality.
The government was especially keen to attract institutions in applied and high-demand fields: economics, management, engineering, IT, and business. These are areas closely linked to economic modernization, I would suggest.
AU: What I’m wondering, though, is that there are a couple of different strategies countries can use here. One is to say: here’s an international institution, here’s a model everybody should rise to—its standards, right? So it’s a kind of competition model, where everyone is encouraged to emulate it.
The other way to do it is the way Qatar has done it, which is to build into the mission of international campuses a responsibility to train local institutions. There’s some twinning, so that if the international institutions ever go away, they’ve at least left some intellectual capital behind.
Which of those two strategies did Uzbekistan take?
KK: I think in our case it was more of a benchmarking strategy. The government was quite selective about who it allowed to operate in the country. It tried to bring in universities that were strong in specific areas. They may not be outstanding in overall global rankings, but in specialized fields they were quite top-notch.
The idea was to create benchmarks—to bring those universities in so they could set important bars and standards for local institutions, whether public or private. I think that’s the model the country employed.
AU: So then, after the arrival of international institutions, you start to see domestic private providers, right? And that really only starts around 2018 or 2019, so it’s quite recent.
What did Uzbekistan learn from regulating foreign institutions that it then transferred into the regulation of new domestic private institutions? And how big a role are private institutions playing in the expansion of higher education in the country?
KK: I think this is an important question. If you look now at the composition of higher education institutions in Uzbekistan, private institutions plus transnational education providers now outnumber public universities. Altogether, we have 207 higher education institutions, of which 101 are public, and 106 are private and TNE providers.
So as you can see, they make up about half of the system. And I would argue that the exponential growth of TNE and private institutions happened almost at the same time. Before 2017, there were only about seven TNE providers. Of course, institutions like ours—we were among the first, with about 25 years of history—so there were a few on the market. But the rapid growth really began at the same time for both TNE and private institutions.
I wouldn’t focus so much on regulatory frameworks that the government learned, but more on governance models. In particular, giving more autonomy to universities, whether public or private. Those are the kinds of features, I would say, that were learned from those benchmarks.
AU: That’s interesting. I don’t often hear that—in countries that are building up their higher education systems, they’re usually looking for less autonomy, not more. They’re usually looking to be more directive. So does that frame the way you think about quality standards? When Uzbekistan does quality assurance, is a lot of that tied to autonomy?
KK: Yes. If you look at the higher education system, much of it is still inherited from our history, from the Soviet system, including governance structures. And what’s particularly important in this context is the quality assurance system. Traditionally, quality assurance was very top-down and centrally controlled.
Now we’re moving away from that toward a more university-led approach—internal, self-driven quality assurance. That’s the system we see working in many parts of the world, and Uzbekistan is moving in that direction as well, toward university-based quality assurance systems.
Of course, we’re learning from different experiences. We work quite closely, for instance, with the UK Quality Assurance Agency, and also with Advance HE and others. We’re trying to learn best practices from around the world while introducing more robust internal quality assurance systems within institutions.
AU: I want to come back to public institutions for a second. When I was there a couple of years ago, it struck me that, yes, you have the National University named after Ulugh Beg, but beyond that, some of your best institutions are very specialized.
You have the State University of Economics, the Institute of Irrigation and Agricultural Mechanization Engineers, and so on. Has there been any thought given to merging these institutions in order to create larger universities that could make a mark on the international scene? Sort of the way Adelaide University is emerging in Australia, or the way the French have merged institutions in places like Paris and Strasbourg?
KK: Yes, absolutely. And when you asked me earlier about the recent history of higher education, I mentioned that the system was highly specialized. You didn’t really see comprehensive universities—there were a few, but most institutions were specialized in specific areas.
What we’re seeing now is a move away from that model. The institutional titles may still reflect specialization, but many institutions have diversified their offerings and now provide degrees in a much wider range of fields.
At the same time, especially in recent years, we’ve also seen mergers of institutions. There are several examples in Tashkent and outside of Tashkent where three or four institutions have merged into one. This has happened, for instance, in medical education, where institutions were merged to improve governance effectiveness and financial viability, and also to diversify what they can offer.
So this is very much happening in Uzbekistan. And in fact, it has led to a decrease in the total number of universities, because we’ve seen a significant number of mergers, especially over the past few years.
AU: And finally, Uzbekistan has accomplished so much in the last decade or so. How far do you think it can go in another decade? What will the main accomplishments be if we did this interview again in 2036? What do you think we’d be talking about?
KK: I think over the next decade the focus will shift from expansion to consolidation. That’s what we’re already seeing. The move will be from massification to consolidation. Access, I don’t think, will be the central issue anymore.
Instead, quality, research capacity, and international reputation will be the priorities over the next five to ten years. Key milestones will include stronger postgraduate education, increased research funding, and deeper international collaboration. Student mobility and academic mobility will grow, and academic careers will become more competitive.
Universities will be judged more by outcomes—graduate employability, innovation, and research impact. And if we have this conversation again in 2036, I suspect we won’t be talking about growth rates anymore. We’ll be asking how Uzbek universities have positioned themselves globally, which is already starting to happen, and how successfully they’ve transitioned from rapid growth to sustainable excellence.
That would be my prediction.
AU: Thank you so much for joining us today.
KK: Thank you. Thank you, Alex.
AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, our listeners and readers, for joining us. If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at podcast@higheredstrategy.com.
Join us next week, when our guest will be Bryan Alexander, author of Peak Higher Education. We’ll be talking about his argument that higher education in the United States—and possibly beyond—has reached a turning point, and what demographic, economic, and political pressures mean for the future of the sector.
Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
