Anastasia Pogorelskaya, Evgeniy Troitsky, Vitaly Pakulin, Nikolay Pogodaev, Olim Turdikulov, Sergey Yun. Central Asian Higher Education Area: goals and prospects according to member-states

A number of Russian initiatives for higher education integration in the post-Soviet area remained on paper due to the lack of support from other countries, for which the harmonization of higher education systems with Russia implied growing educational migration towards Russian universities. The initiative for higher education integration within Central Asia came from Kazakhstan, which thereby not only tried to distance itself from Russia in matters of higher education, but also to declare its own interests in the region.

On June 17-18, 2021, a Ministerial conference for education in Central Asian countries was held in Turkestan (Kazakhstan). As a result, a new project in higher education was launched, namely the Central Asian Higher Education Area (CAHEA). It was based on the Turkestan Declaration signed on June 18, 2021, and all five countries in the region - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan - agreed to participate in it. However, there is also, and potentially will be, growing competition among them for students, and therefore they have diverging interests towards CAHEA. In this regard, it is difficult to expect a quick filling of this initiative with real content and rapid achievement of its goals...