This year’s testing of high school students for university entrance produced dismal results. Every third high school graduate failed to achieve the minimally required 40 scores. Only 0,6% of applicants managed to get more than 100 testing scores. What is more surprising, among those who failed to pass the 40-score threshold were 708 high school graduates awarded with a certificate of distinction for excellent academic performance at school. “We see now that these certificates were granted to them falsely” admitted the director of the Department of Secondary Schools of the Ministry of Education Serik Irsaliiev.

Sadly enough, with the advent of market economy in Kazakhstan, higher education, once a matter of social prestige, became a springboard in career-making for some, and a means of enrichment for others. Universities are full of suspiciously young doctors and professors of dubious making. Within a few years many teachers’ training colleges were renamed universities all over Kazakhstan without giving much trouble to upgrade their standard of education to the level the status of a university requires.

Last year, five or six private universities were deprived of their licenses for inadequate educational standards. But there are many others mushrooming up in various parts of the country which makes the process practically uncontrollable. “Why bother to attend these silly university courses, when you can buy diplomas of any sorts at a market?” runs a popular joke.

Nearly 75% of university applicants opt for law education, economics, journalism or diplomacy. Applicants from poor families, as a rule, from rural areas, choose less expensive agricultural colleges, teachers’ training colleges, and nursery courses. This growing imbalance is widening the gap between the rich in big cities and the poor in villages. It also alarms the government. There is a dramatic shortage of tractor drivers, civil engineers, teachers and medical nurses in villages. There have been many attempts to make vocational schools more attractive for young people, but to no avail.

If the short-sighted policy of churning out journalists and diplomats is not to stop, warn experts, in the next decade the agriculture of Kazakhstan will face a devastating crisis. This policy affects rural schools as well. Up to now, it has been possible to hide the acute shortage of teachers in village schools by using people qualified in one subject to teach another. But illiteracy among teachers has become anecdotal to the point, that the Ministry of Education recently announced its decision to bar unqualified teachers from schools.

To an outside observer, a school in Kazakhstan with neat classrooms equipped with modern computers may have a quiet civilized look. According to official data, there is on average one computer per 50 students in Kazakhstan. But most schools in rural areas have no telephone connection or cannot afford Internet services. Village teachers are among the lowest paid section of the population.

The existing system of school management lays a considerable financial burden on parents, who have to make “voluntary” contributions to finance repair works, or to pay utility services. Although the Ministry of Education issued a decree banning the practice of collecting money from parents, state funding is not adequate to cover all costs. So officials close their eyes to parental contributions.

Declining educational standards have triggered a series of debates in Kazakhstan. Many teachers think that entrance tests to universities should be conducted by independent testers, and not by university teachers. It sounds convincing when one considers the scale of corruption which has long wormed its way into colleges and universities. The former minister of education Shamshat Berkimbayeva, who came up with the half-baked concept of introducing a 12-year school education is rallying numerous supporters around her idea. Whether this scheme will bring the country out of educational impasse is not yet known.

The official educational concept places accent on fostering national moral values and patriotic duty. But these goals are hard to achieve under present circumstances. Teachers complain that all too often, they have to use Russian textbooks, since publishing houses in Kazakhstan cannot supply the necessary quantity of books.

Since 1994, within the framework of the educational project Bolashak (Future), more than 600 students were sent to study abroad, mainly in American universities, and then especially children from influential families. This year, the government admitted that some of the students did not return to Kazakhstan on completion of their study. This year, the project will be revised, and the number of students to be sent abroad will be reduced to 26. Regrettably, that will not ward off the rush of the brain drain.