Kyrgyzstan: Quality Assurance—Do State Standards Matter?

Abstract

Africa is viewed as a continent with huge potential for growth, and is called upon to harness its resources to emerge. Universities in Africa have tremendous capacities and resources to deploy in favor of training, development, and innovation. As the knowledge economy grows, careers needing doctoral education will emerge in Africa, and new methods of teaching and research will need to supersede the traditional ones. Academics holding a PhD must be motivated and guided to produce more doctorates that will strengthen and empower the labor force. Digitization and computerization will play a key role in the transformation process of all businesses, and of the financial, educational, and other key development sectors in Africa. Likewise, universities will need to provide increased access to electronic research databases and improved information technology facilities for conducting research. Universities will need to review their model of doctoral education for new and better models of postgraduate management, supervision and coordination, providing more peer interaction and international collaboration. Regulatory mechanisms and policies at national or regional level should guide the implementation of research strategies and plans. Regular assessments must be in place to ensure that the outcomes of doctoral education match skills requirement for the academic, industrial, public and private job markets. Tracer studies will certainly help to understand the degree of employability of the doctoral graduates on the job market, and will determine the extent of the research contribution and impact on the knowledge economy. Last but not least, increase in support must be provided for research performing institutions, with a more stable model for funding.

25 Years of transformations of higher education systems in post-Soviet countries: reform and continuity

“…These processes have been driven by economic, political and cultural reform agendas which seek to shift from state to private funding for higher education; to create economic and political mechanisms of competition for students, resources, and prestige; and to transform higher education from a public system into a field of autonomous entities which compete for revenue and prestige through the sale of commodified teaching and research products, goods, or services (Amsler 2008(Amsler , 2013. Within this framework, the Kyrgyz Ministry of Education and Science officially regulates the functions of individual HEIs through its licensing and accreditation mechanisms (although deregulation of 'attestation' has been proposed; see Merrill 2016) and maintains control over some processes of institutional diversification such as the functional and hierarchical distinction between elite (PhD-awarding, state-scholarship recruiting) and non-elite (BA-awarding, 'contract'-focused) institutions.…”

Faculty in Contemporary Kyrgyzstan: Reactions to Reforms

“…On May 15, 2014, the Minister of Education, Kanat Sadykov, announced that state attestation of higher education programs would end and be replaced by independent accreditation (Kudryavtseva, 2014). Defining the legal requirements for establishing independent accreditation agencies and the criteria by which they would evaluate programs took nearly two years, during which time university program evaluation was in a kind of limbo (Merrill, 2016), raising the question of whether or not students graduating from programs that should have had their five-year updates would have valid degrees, but finally independent accreditation started in 2016 (with a few pilots performed earlier). By 2019, five agencies were legally constituted (Ryskulova, 2019), with two of them, EdNet (n.d.) and the Agency for the Accreditation of Educational Programs and Organizations (AAOPO, no date) being most active.…”