A recent radio interview with Umed Mansurov, Vice-Rector (President) for International Affairs of Russian-Tajik Slavonic University in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, shed interesting light on what the future may hold for the country’s higher education sector.

Mansurov points to a number of reforms that have been introduced over the past 20 years. For Tajikistan, the most significant has been the decision to introduce ‘European standards’ (this means implementing the Bologna Process programme of reforms), which in turn requires the introduction of quality assurance measures such as having degree programs accredited by international bodies.

Mansurov praises the country’s inherited Soviet system of education as having provided a ‘more fundamental and deeper’ level of training, but also critiques both the old system and the Soviet-trained teachers still embracing that era’s pedagogical and scientific norms as outdated and no longer fit for the country’s economy.

The Bologna system is deemed to be more suitable, for example by providing greater opportunities to specialize later by studying for a Master’s degree. The big shift for ex-Soviet countries has been from a typically five year Specialist undergraduate degree – which in the West is often seen as comparable to a combined Bachelor’s and Master’s – to the European model of a three year Bachelor’s followed by a two year Master’s degree. The introduction of a new Master’s degree has been slow to embed in Tajikistan, and many employers, parents, faculty members and students themselves are sceptical about the value of a Bachelor’s degree.

Although Mansurov thinks the opportunities for greater academic mobility offered by the Bologna system are positive for Tajikistan, he realistically notes that “academic mobility is an expensive pleasure”. Mansurov mentions costs such as transport and living expenses, but his analogy could be extended to access to mobility – it remains the case that the small number of Tajik students who get to study abroad tend to be from wealthier families.

In response, Mansurov believes that there should be more inter-regional cooperation among Central Asian universities. However, “coordination [between them] is very weak”. As a result, his university tends to send students to Russia and Belarus for exchange and he says there aren’t many international students studying in Central Asia at all.

As Mansurov, says “much still needs to be done”. For the time being, that’s a comment that could easily apply to almost all efforts to make substantive changes to Tajikistan’s higher education.