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Kazakhstan

Central Asia: Almaty, Astana, and the system most readers of this guide are already inside

The option a guide like this usually refuses to write about: staying, paying a fraction of the cost, and leaving later with a degree already in hand.

This suits you if…

You want to keep your options open without spending your family's savings on a first attempt, or your target profession is licensed nationally, as law and medicine and the public service are, and practised here.

Look elsewhere if…

You want research at the front of a field, or a career in a market that won't read a Kazakhstani degree. In both cases the honest answer is a strong local bachelor's plus a funded master's abroad. Not four years here hoping the degree converts on its own.

What it gives, what it costs

What only this place gives you

The only place on this list where you already have the language, the documents, the residence and your family, so both the money and the risk drop far enough that a second, larger step later can be taken from strength rather than from desperation.

What is good here

  • State grants cover tuition in full for a large share of places, awarded on one national examination rather than on essays, activities or the money to prepare for either.
  • Law, medicine and public administration are national qualifications. Studying them here isn't a compromise, it is the shorter route to actually practising here.
  • Several universities teach in English and run joint or dual degrees with foreign partners, so an international credential doesn't always require leaving.
  • The cost of a wrong turn is small: changing direction after a year costs a year, not a family's savings and a visa.
  • Bolashak funds postgraduate study abroad for citizens, so a strong local degree is a documented route out later rather than a closed door.

What it costs you

  • Research funding and laboratory equipment are thin outside a few institutions, and it shows most in the natural sciences.
  • The graduate market is concentrated in Almaty and Astana; outside them the ladder is short and the ceiling arrives early.
  • Teaching in many faculties still rests on memorisation and the final examination, so independent research skills have to be built on your own initiative.
  • A domestic bachelor's is read cautiously by foreign employers and admissions offices, so the second step usually needs a strong test score or a master's abroad to translate it.
  • Integrity in admissions and assessment has improved but isn't uniform, and the variation between institutions is wider than any published list will tell you.
  • English-taught programmes range from genuinely international to nominal, and the label alone doesn't tell you which one you are looking at.

Money

How paying for it works

The cheapest serious option in this guide by a wide margin: state grants cover tuition for a substantial share of places, university and employer scholarships fill part of the rest, and you live at home or in subsidised accommodation instead of paying Western European rent. The cost that actually bites isn't fees but time. Four years on a weak programme is the most expensive thing on this page.

Getting in

What they weigh

The national testing system decides most of it: one examination after school, scored against subject combinations that map to specific programmes, with the state grant competition run on the same score. Choosing the subject combination is effectively choosing your field, and that choice is made months before the examination itself.

The cycle: when things actually happen

The whole year turns on one summer: the national test is taken after school ends, the grant competition is decided on those scores within weeks, and university applications follow immediately. The subject combination for the test is declared months earlier, and that is the decision that actually locks your field, long before anyone discusses universities. If you are aiming at a local place and a foreign one at the same time, the calendars overlap badly: foreign applications close in the autumn and winter of the same final year, so both have to be prepared in parallel from the spring before.

How an application is actually read here

Numerically, and almost only numerically. The test score against published thresholds decides grants and places, with quotas layered on top; essays, portfolios and interviews barely feature outside creative and a few international programmes. There is no equivalent of the American reading of a person, and that cuts both ways. A weak year can't be explained away, but a student with no network and no polished self-presentation isn't punished for lacking either.

What applicants from this region get wrong

Treating staying as failure. The students who do best here choose the local degree deliberately, spend the money they didn't put into tuition on tests, certificates and English, and leave for a funded master's with a real record behind them. The ones who suffer enrol at home as a fallback, disengage for four years, and arrive at the same decision at twenty-two with nothing added.

Who is named here

Not a ranking, and deliberately not in any order of merit. These are the places a subject is actually studied and taught at here, so you have something to search for. A position in a league table is stale within a year, differs between the four tables that publish one, and is the wrong first question. What each is named for holds for years.

  • Nazarbayev University

    Astana

    • Engineering
    • Computer Science
    • Natural Sciences
    • Medicine & Health

    Degrees taught in English

  • Al-Farabi Kazakh National University

    Almaty

    • Natural Sciences
    • Humanities & Social Sciences
    • Law
    • Medicine & Health

    Some English-taught programmes

  • Kazakh-British Technical University

    Almaty

    • Engineering
    • Computer Science
    • Business & Economics

    Some English-taught programmes

  • Satbayev University

    Almaty

    • Engineering
    • Natural Sciences

    Some English-taught programmes

  • KIMEP University

    Almaty

    • Business & Economics
    • Law
    • Humanities & Social Sciences

    Degrees taught in English

Language of teaching is the one thing here that moves within a cycle. A country can widen or cut its English-taught intake in a single year. Check it on the university’s own page, for your own entry year.

Living there, and after

What studying there is like

Structured, lecture-led and examination-heavy, with fixed programmes and comparatively little choice of courses inside a degree. Attendance is tracked, a cohort moves through the whole degree together, and the relationship with a supervisor matters more than any course catalogue. Independent research exists where a faculty has active researchers and doesn't where it has none. So the individual department, not the university's name, is the thing to investigate before choosing.

After you graduate

You are already a citizen: no permit, no clock, no lottery. The question isn't whether you may stay but whether the ladder you are standing on is worth staying on, and that is decided by employer and city rather than by immigration policy.Post-study work rules are set by politics and change. Check the rule for your own graduation year before you plan around it.

Check it yourself

The rules on this page are set by these bodies, not by us. Immigration and fee rules in particular change between the year you read this and the year you graduate, so open the one that decides your case and read it for your own year.

Links checked August 2026.

What studying here is a route into

The kinds of work Kazakhstan is a route into, each with what it actually involves, and what the catch is.

The cities inside it

Each one opens its own page: what clusters there, the catch, and the door in for someone who is not from there.