Branch campuses are rapidly emerging in Kazakhstan. Over the past four years, more than 36 foreign universities have established campuses and centres in the country, including De Montfort University (opened in 2021), Coventry University (2024), Cardiff University (2025), and the Heriot-Watt partnership campus (launched in 2023). This expansion has taken place under the current administration, following the President’s instruction to attract leading foreign universities to Kazakhstan, and is framed by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education as part of a national strategy for a regional academic hub aimed at delivering internationally recognised degrees at home.

Transnational higher education (TNE) is, in many respects, a success story for Kazakhstan. It offers internationally branded degrees and credentials, strengthens graduates’ labour‑market signalling and employability, and opens access to international academic and professional networks that can translate into social and cultural capital for individuals and their families. For universities, TNE partnerships can mean new funding streams, staff development, and opportunities to participate in international projects. At the same time, research into international branch campuses has shown how these arrangements can redistribute benefits in uneven ways if they are not carefully designed, sometimes reinforcing hierarchies between sending and receiving institutions. In the Kazakhstani context, Hwami (2024) shows how internationalisation more broadly can reproduce inequalities and geopolitical hierarchies in terms of whose knowledge, languages, and partnerships are most valued. Early reflections on the boom of branch campuses, including debates about Western universities and knowledge export, underscore the need to ask whose interests these partnerships serve, as Fatih Aktas also argues. In this context, the key question is not whether TNE is beneficial; it clearly is, but how those benefits are shared between foreign and local institutions, and how far they contribute to building Kazakhstan’s academic capacity over the long term.

Phan Le Ha offers a useful lens on the cross-regional dynamics of transnational education. Drawing on her FreshEd conversation, we can see how TNE often operates by transferring established curricula, institutional logics, and English as the default language of prestige rather than through fully symmetrical exchange. Kazakhstan’s policy trajectory fits this pattern, but not passively: English has been positioned as a strategic priority through trilingual education and higher‑education internationalisation reforms, with the aim of integrating the country more fully into global academic and economic networks. Since joining the Bologna Process in 2010, Kazakhstan has pursued internationally recognised reforms and expanded English‑medium instruction.

Within this strategy, language becomes a key lever. Kazakhstan’s public school system, including many rural schools, has made significant efforts to expand English teaching and raise overall learning outcomes. At the same time, evidence from national and British Council studies indicates that graduates from rural or less‑resourced schools often have lower English proficiency than their peers in major cities, which can make it harder—though not impossible, to meet the entry requirements of English‑medium TNE programmes. In practice, access to these programmes is largely merit‑based, via national examinations and language tests, but the starting conditions are not identical for all students. Recognising this gap does not undermine the reform; rather, it suggests that targeted support (for example, bridging courses, language support, and scholarships) can help ensure that talented students from all regions can benefit from the new opportunities TNE creates.

Fazal Rizvi invites us, in his FreshEd episode on “The Rise of Asia Higher Education?”, to think about how countries in Asia tell their own stories about becoming regional and global education hubs. He shows that policy debates often revolve around how to move from “importing” models to shaping and co-creating them. This question is highly relevant for Kazakhstan, where most TNE activity currently focuses on foreign institutions establishing programmes for local students in Kazakhstan’s major cities. In 2024, the analysis of the Council for Strategic Partnership with Foreign Universities reflected  Kazakhstan’s focus on deepening collaboration with foreign partners through joint scientific projects and research universities. Therefore, in the next phase, it would be good to ensure that these partnerships help strengthen local universities as centres of excellence in their own right, rather than simply hosting external programmes. That means thinking about TNE not only as provision of degrees, but as a platform for joint curriculum design, co‑supervised doctoral programmes, and sustainable research collaboration in areas that matter for Kazakhstan’s development.

This is where the decolonial caution from Riyad Shahjahan, Annabelle Estera, and Kirsten Edwards becomes especially constructive. Their FreshEd conversation on decolonising education highlights that partnerships can be more equitable when local knowledge, languages, and ethical frameworks are not an afterthought but integral to programme design and research agendas. Kazakhstan’s reforms already emphasise innovation, the knowledge economy, and academic excellence. Building on this, one practical consideration is to place a strong emphasis on joint research centres, co-authored publications, and capacity‑building for local faculty. Integrating robust international research ethics, such as data management and the protection of research participants, into these collaborations can further position Kazakh universities as trusted partners in global science.

Seen this way, TNE is not only about hosting foreign brands; it is a tool for strengthening Kazakhstan’s own institutions. If partnerships are structured to support joint knowledge production, ethical research practice, and broad-based student access within Kazakhstan, TNE can help move the country from being primarily a recipient of programmes to an active co-creator of regional and global higher education.

March 7, 2026