The votes have been counted and the results are in and… well, it turns out that Kazakhstan’s higher education is not as corrupt as you might have thought.

According to a report in Arna Press [ru], students in East Kazakhstan were generally pretty satisfied with their ability to progress through higher education without resorting to bribes.

Over 1,100 students at universities and technical/vocational training institutes in the region completed a survey organized by the East Kazakhstan Region State Agency for Civil Service and Anti-Corruption [ru]. Just 23 of that number – around 0.02% – said that they had bribed a professor, 40 reported using personal or family connections to get around the rules and only 72 admitted to cheating (e.g. using their mobile phone in exams, plagiarising others’ work).

When asked how effectively they thought their universities were dealing with corruption, over half of students said ‘extremely well’, the most positive response on the 5-point scale; only 6.5% gave an extremely negative answer. Fewer than 3% said they regularly encountered situations that could only be resolved through corrupt means whilst nearly 70% said this had never happened to them. And over 80% of those surveyed said they had not come across ‘unfair practices’ (giving bribes or gifts, use of personal connections etc).

Those are extremely pleasing reports for the government, which has committed itself to rooting out corruption from higher education. It has even developed a corruption ranking of universities to name and shame poor performers.

Perhaps the survey results are an indication of deep change in higher education in Kazakhstan, which since Soviet times has been plagued by various forms of corruption. It really would be something if a student could get through a degree without having to know the right people or come from the right family, or have to dig deep into their pockets where cash is not necessarily available in the first place – that is to say, to get a qualification based on what you know, not who you know or whether you can afford to do it.

But these results run counter to the opinion of almost every person in the country I’ve ever spoken to about higher education. I’ve been told and have read about countless stories of corruption from its mildest instances to troublingly deep problems.

It would be easy to reach the conclusion that these survey results [ru] are just as corrupt as the system continues to be. Yet the optimist in me dares to hope that even if there’s some skewing in the outcomes, the prospects for able students without money or connections might just be getting brighter in Kazakhstan.