Different governments deal with restructuring their higher education systems in different ways, aiming for different outcomes. One of the growing tendencies in the national HE policy arena in different contexts has been an attempt to differentiate HE institutions into ‘teaching only’ and ‘research only’, as differentiating the academic system and drifting mission has been considered a primary factor in advancing research (van der Wende, 2014; Altbach, 2009). This paper explores recent reforms in HE system in Kazakhstan with regard to differentiating HEIs drawing upon perceptions of public universities and state-level policy document analysis through addresses the following questions:

• What is the rationale behind the government’s differentiation policies?
• How are the government’s differentiation policies perceived and responded to by HEIs?

This study was conducted as part of doctoral research at the University College London in 2016-2019.

During the early Independence period when the country’s efforts to transition from the dominant Soviet communist agenda of universities as teaching only with limited access to Western market-oriented ideology gave rise to private providers making HE more accessible and provoking massification. After the first decade of the 2000s, the government started seeking to optimise the number of HEIs by merging and/or closing some institutions that failed to meet state standards (OECD, 2017) and transform the system by creating research universities in order to encourage research and innovation development (parlam.kz, 2011). The government’s intention was to concentrate research capacity in selected research universities, giving them more budgetary funding for generating new technologies and innovation, while the rest of the HEIs were recommended to strategize their operations for advancing regional-level research (Canning, 2017). With diverse missions and differentiated by their scope for research and teaching, HEIs are stratified with research universities being at the top of the system and whose main focus is the generation and transfer of new knowledge through research and innovation.

As part of the broader differentiating policies with the focus on developing selected universities into research-intensive institutions, the government implemented a change in the organizational system of public HEIs from state enterprise to a non-commercial joint-stock company type with 100% state ownership, as well as introducing a board of trustees and various councils who will be engaged in governing the university collectively. This reform is carried out in order to provide legal opportunities for enlarging academic and governance autonomy of HEIs which is a completely new phenomenon for the HE system of Kazakhstan. However, what participants conveyed is that while there is an awareness of differentiation policies and drivers behind the emphasis towards developing research in HE, there is no particular effect is observed in relation to their work so far. This might be due to the state policies remaining at a documentary level with no further actions or processes of implementation being carried out or accentuated so far.

While differentiating HEIs might be considered as “tidying up the mess in the system” (policy-maker respondent), it inevitably creates vertical stratification between them. As such, in the case of Kazakhstan with large territories and the system is yet between Soviet legacy and the global hegemony of competition and global positioning (Deem, Mok and Lukas, 2008; Ishikawa, 2009), stratification caused by inequalities of resources in the condition of scarce funding, raises the question of excellence versus equity, and  a danger of creating more marginalised institutions while the elites prosper (Halfmann and Leydesdorff, 2010). Such a scenario might be highly probable with institutions located regionally already suffer from insufficient financial and human resources while being pressurised by various state performance-based requirements.

Qualitative semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis were employed to answer the following questions: • What is the rationale behind the government’s differentiation policies? • How are the government’s differentiation policies perceived and responded to by HEIs? A total of 29 interviews with key administration and academic staff including senior members of staff in charge of strategic development at three regional public universities, NU and Ministry were conducted. The data gathered from the interviews were triangulated through the analysis of state-level and institutional policy documents. Data was analysed using thematic analysis. Three public universities were selected from the list of public universities from three regions that have similar characteristics. All three universities are multiversities training specialists in a range of specialities in art, humanities, social sciences and sciences. State universities have always been a bedrock of the higher education system in Kazakhstan, and, being under the centralised governance of the Ministry of Education and Science, have a high level of accountability, and are expected to follow the governmental line. All state universities have the same status in the higher education legislation and are not stratified by their legal standing. Additionally, due to the vast territory of Kazakhstan, the regions were selected for the travel convenience.

The findings of this study convey to us a differentiation story in Kazakhstan that is largely based on two perspectives. Firstly, as most of the existing research in the field acknowledged the idea of diversity and differentiation based on the re-structuring of HE due to expansion and massification (Meek et al, 2000; Douglass, 2007), differentiation in Kazakhstan has also been dictated by the expansion of HE after Independence and by the growth of private providers. Secondly, what seems clear is that differentiation policies are largely dictated by a rhetoric of universal globalisation and the benefits of a knowledge economy (Dakka, 2015) and the global challenges faced by national systems (Palfreyman and Tapper, 2009). The importance of research promoted by league tables is another drive behind national governments striving to create and support research universities (Hazelkorn, 2011; 2012). This largely explains the Kazakhstan government’s emphasis on encapsulating the notion of the ‘Research University’ in policy documents, while it gives an impression of a de-jure differentiation from other categories of HEIs which exist only on paper. Moreover, it is not clear from the policy documents how research universities will be developed further from the existing institutions. At this stage of development, the government’s changing ideas about how to categorize institutions to make the system more effective and quality sustainable, might not be advantageous for the systems in middle-income economies, like Kazakhstan, with scarce funds available for public universities. Moreover, in centralized systems where HEIs are not yet autonomous differentiating by categories causes stratification separating institutions into mass and elite, as resource dependency and central regulation likely limit public universities' activities while private universities prosper. Rather, with less state intervention and more freedom, universities might better navigate healthy competition among themselves and better tailor their teaching and research.

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