Kasha and Quality in Kyrgyzstan: Donors, Diversity, and Dis-Integration in Higher Education

Kyrgyzstan's relative openness to a diversity of ideas, combined with its poverty, has caused it to accept a plethora of international academic institutions and programs, often exported by the sender rather than imported at Kyrgyzstan's request. These institutions suggest a variety of visions of Kyrgyzstan's future and of the political and religious identities of its citizens. The exported programs reveal a range of "donor logics," including different ideas about what constitutes quality. The result is a system lacking in integration. It includes three-year bachelor's degrees, four-year bachelor's degrees, five-year diploms, one- and two-year master's degrees, kandidat nauks, programs based on contact hours, programs using credit hours (some U.S.-style, some European), and universities teaching in Kyrgyz, Russian, English, and Turkish. The result is kasha—literally, porridge, with a little of this and a little of that added in, but in slang, a mess.