Emma Harden-Wolfson

In May 2023 I had the privilege to speak at a conference organized by Tashkent State University of Economics (TSUE) in Uzbekistan. The conference was opened by the Minister of Higher Education and TSUE’s Rector, with an interesting line-up of international speakers who shared research and ideas on the broad topic of educational quality.

I was invited to speak on the internationalization and regionalization of higher education, which I took up through a focus on student mobility from the context of Uzbekistan as well as in regional and global settings. You can watch the recording of my full presentation here (from minute 20), although the audio gets very spotty at times.

Here are three highlights from what I had to say:

First things first: the growth in outbound student mobility from Uzbekistan in the last year alone has been astonishing. Have a look at the graph below to see the almost 50% increase. I’ve got ideas about what could explain some of this growth but I’m keen to know what you may see as possible causes.

Second, this growth is reflected in the dramatically higher number of students from Uzbekistan studying in other countries in Central Asia – this was already much higher than regional mobility from the other four Central Asian countries but is now almost off the chart. Note also the interesting reverse trend in Kazakhstan where fewer students study abroad in Central Asia in 2020 than in previous years.

Thirdly, looking at the regional context in a different way, a stand-out finding is that the top 10 countries sending international students to study in Central Asia are all geographically and/or linguistically connected to the region. Uzbekistan is far and away the largest sending country followed, as shown in the visual below, with almost double the number of top 2 sending country India.

Thanks again to Dr Khudaykulov and the team at TSUE for an excellent and really well organized conference. I hope to be back in Uzbekistan again soon!