This is a wonderful infographic from Sputnik, a Russia media agency that set up shop in Kyrgyzstan last year. Produced recently for International Day of Students, the original article is here.

For me, the most interesting stories are:

1. The mismatch between the funding that the state is making available to students, and the courses they want to study
2. The continuing popularity of computing-related and social sciences subjects
3. The huge growth in the number of international students from India and Kazakhstan, and the parallel crash in the Uzbek student body

For non-Russian readers, a translation is below.

Emma’s English translation…

Title: Student-2015

Which courses did students choose this year, what do the brightest want to be come and which professions does the state need?

Image 1 (light background)

Left: courses for which the government provided the most scholarship places – physics/maths, philology (a combination of literary criticism, history and linguistics), medicine

Right: most popular courses (by enrolment statistics) – economics, law, medicine

38,275 students enrolled in 2015, compared to 38,259 in 2014.

Image 2 (dark blue background)

4,868 students received state funding in 2015; 3,415 students received state funding on the basis of their results in the nationwide admissions exams (ORT in Russian acronym) in 2015. The median score in the ORT was 150,8 to get a state scholarship.

33,407 students are self-funding in 2015. Their median ORT score was 133,2.

Which courses were most popular amongst those scoring highest on the ORT?

How many state funded places were offered in 2015?

5,441 divided between 24 universities. The highest number of places (615) went to the Kyrgyz State Technical University; the lowest (62) to the Kyrgyz Republic National Academy of Arts. The average tuition fee is 33,000 som (USD$430) compared to 30,000 last year.

Number of foreign students studying in Kyrgyzstan in 2014/15

The yellow to green indicator at the top is for countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States; the pink to red indicator at the bottom is for other countries. The graphs below show an increase from around 3,000 to 4,800 from Kazakhstan during the period 2009/10 to 2014/15 and a huge drop – from 6,000 to 600 from Uzbekistan. The biggest increase from outside the former Soviet region is from India, where student numbers have grown from around 500 to nearly 2,500.