NUR-SULTAN – The Kazakh government has allocated a record number of 128,000 student grants for local college applicants, which is 45,000 more grants than last year, the Central Communications Service reports. The initiative is dedicated to the Year of Children declared by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in his New Year address.
According to ranking.kz, National Statistics Committee, there were 724 colleges in the country at the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year. Photo credit: inform.kz
The largest number of grants are allocated for technical sciences including IT, Construction, Engineering and Metallurgy.
Approximately 70 percent of ninth grade graduates receive free education in the country’s colleges at the expense of the state, said Technical and Vocational Education Department Head Nasymzhan Ospanova.
“The Kazakh Ministry of Education and Science has also introduced targeted training of personnel at the request of enterprises with a commitment to employment, so children will be guaranteed employment. This will allow us to produce specialists on demand of the labor market and as a result improve the quality of training,” Ospanova said.
In the upcoming academic year, the country’s colleges will start to prepare personnel in new specialties, including Robotics and Embedded Systems, Additive Production Technologies, Computer-Aided Systems of Design and Maintenance of Buildings, Graphic and Multimedia Design and Landscape Design.
It is reported that students may apply for four specialties in four colleges not only in the traditional paper format, but through the egov.kz website.
Earlier in 2021, the ministry introduced a new mechanism on the principle of “Money goes to the student,” which means that the state allocates grants on the basis of applicants’ choice.
In the same year, the list of quota categories was increased to nine categories.
