Kazakh newspaper The Astana Times has this week published a story featuring three Bolashak scholarship holders to understand what happens once they return to Kazakhstan.

The Bolashak Scholarships are the Kazakh government’s flagship scholarship programme, and have sent over 10,000 students abroad to study at top universities around the world. Although a condition of the scholarship is that students must return to Kazakhstan to work for at least five years for any private or public sector company or the state, it’s estimated that around half of the scholars have not [yet] made it back home.

The Astana Times article focuses on a small number of students who have returned. They all suggest that the scholarship has been instrumental in improving their career prospects, although they perhaps hadn’t realised the impact it would have when they were applying for jobs.

There’s always a difficult balance to be found when an organisation wishes to support students to continue their studies outside their home country but then requires them to return. I think this is particularly the case if the student is moving from a poorer to a richer country (by which I mean ‘rich’ in a wide sense, in that the education system may be better developed, career prospects may be broader, etc) where the pull factors of remaining in the host country may out-number the push factors encouraging a student to return home. But I’ve also seen students stay in the UK who come from countries where the career prospects are just as good because whilst here they set down roots – such as enjoying living in a particular city or establishing a relationship with someone – that provide more compelling reasons to stay.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that by offering students the opportunity to study abroad, at least some will choose to stay away in the short-term. Governments and other funding bodies should focus their efforts on keeping in touch with their scholarship alumni, encouraging them to continue to develop their skills so that at some point in the future these can be applied for the benefit of their home country.