Can national ambition translate into lasting higher education impact?
QS Midweek Brief - October 21, 2026. Japan and Kazakhstan are planning significant changes to their higher education systems.
Welcome! At the start of the year, we carried a cover article on why so many destinations have decided to release education strategies. A big reason is that they provide a clear, shared target for a region based on needs, so this week, we go in-depth on strategies for two countries: Japan and Kazakhstan.
As you might expect, both have differences based on their individual needs. Japan is conducting a multi-decade funding overhaul, while Kazakhstan is aiming to become a regional leader.
Stay insightful,
Anton John Crace
Editor in Chief, QS Insights Magazine
QS Quacquarelli Symonds
Japan’s bold 25-year funding experiment
By Rohan Mehra
In brief
- Japan has launched a 25-year, US$63 billion university fund to overhaul higher education and boost its global standing.
- The initiative drives US-style matching endowments, governance reforms, international collaboration and measurable societal impact.
- Long-term success relies on converting funds into deep institutional reform without widening inequality across the higher education sector.
When you hear about a large research funding exercise anywhere in the world, it often comes with expectations of heightened research output, tangible economic impacts or greater focus on some specific area; AI in the US ticks those boxes. But in Japan, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has committed ¥10 trillion (~US$63 billion) over 25 years to transform universities in ways that extend beyond research output.
First awarded in 2024, MEXT’s Universities for International Research Excellence (UIRE) accreditation appears forward-thinking, socially aware and could, by accident or design, create the blueprint for Japan’s 21st-century research university.
More than a research fund
UIRE can perhaps be seen as the logical evolution of earlier instances of higher education sector reform. For example, the 2004 National University Corporation framework aimed to increase autonomy and accountability amongst the national universities, though it did not concern itself with impacts or economic matters.
UIRE builds on this, and the accreditation criteria strongly imply what MEXT thinks a world-class university ought to be, requiring not only a high standard of research, but demonstrable utilisation of it too. Other aims include increased interdisciplinarity, industrial partnerships, international cooperation, reduced administrative overhead and crucially, financial self-sustainability.
With accreditation comes some of that ¥10 trillion funding, but this is mostly a matching mechanism to encourage recipient universities, whether private or public, to raise their own funds in increasingly diverse ways. Part of the funding is matched to an institution's five-year average for non-public self-raised funds, with another chunk based on how much the institution puts into its own endowment.
For those already familiar with higher education funding, this pattern closely resembles some patterns in US higher education, though how it will translate to Japan’s unique system remains to be seen.
Professor Kotaro Inoue is the Chief Financial Officer for the Institute of Science Tokyo, which officially began in late 2024 following the merger of two other leading national universities, Tokyo Institute of Technology and Tokyo Medical and Dental University. The university received UIRE accreditation in early 2026.
“We have already strengthened our fundraising framework under the direct supervision of the President and CEO Naoto Ohtake, inspired by discussions with Harvard Management Company and Yale University,” he says. “UIRE provides a strong reason for us to think about how to revise the endowment fund to allow for greater financial autonomy in the next 25 years, for example, through increasing industrial and social partnerships.”
But money alone doesn’t translate directly to “research excellence”. If it did, there’d be an unmistakable connection between a university’s net worth and its position in the rankings, rather than a loose correlation mostly towards the top, and it would be visible over time as institutional and regional wealth ebbs and flows. So while some of the UIRE funding is intended for research, a large reason for it existing at all is actually to incentivise internal reforms in the hope that they enhance research and its societal impacts.
From research to impact
In a piece for EMBO Reports, Professor Emeritus Noriko Osumi from the Department of Developmental Neuroscience at Tohoku University — the first UIRE recipient in 2024 — observed how Japanese researchers’ attitudes can differ from elsewhere. “Traditionally, researchers in Japanese academia have shown limited engagement with practical application of their work or its social impact,” she wrote.
“However, the UIRE initiative is expected to change this mindset…”.
If that change is to happen, it will likely require changes in governance as well as funding. “The most important thing behind UIRE is the view that Japanese universities are in need of governance reform. To make the required changes, we need some money. So I think that UIRE is the opportunity the sector needs to fund reforms, as opposed to typical HES funding, which aims purely at research,” Professor Osumi, who is also Executive Director for the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), tells QS Insights.
“For example, we need to improve the way we support researchers by flattening traditional hierarchies to increase autonomy and by increasing our university research administrators (URA). These are things that Tohoku University had already started working on, but UIRE compels us to develop them further.”
Reform from within
Administrative reform is also high on the agenda — and has been for a while — at the third and most recent UIRE recipient, Kyoto University. Director of Global Communications David Hajime Kornhauser has been involved with several aspects of their reforms, especially its URA programme.
“Until 15 years ago, every academic centre had its own administrative section. There was a lot of discrepancy throughout the organisation. So they brought everything together into these big administrative offices, leaving only a skeleton crew of admin staff in each section,” he says.
“An unintended consequence was that researchers became more distant from administrators. Our attempt to reform that relationship, including with the URAs, predates UIRE, but the accreditation gives the university a much larger institutional framework within which to pursue it, and of course the necessary resources.”
This is a pattern across the first three UIRE recipients: the universities were already making changes that aligned with the accreditation's requirements. This is unlikely a coincidence, and suggests UIRE could be seen as an accelerator of sorts. Rather than imposing reforms, MEXT appears to be providing resources to scale and coordinate efforts that are already showing promise.
Institute of Science Tokyo clearly illustrates this. Given their recent reboot, strategic transformations and university-wide reorganisations were already taking place.
“UIRE rewards breaking away from existing frameworks, and our merger demonstrated our drive for that. But we are also undergoing a full revitalisation of our research organisation with what we call the Visionary Initiatives,” says Professor Inoue.
“The idea is for research to be focused towards vision-driven goals set in key areas such as the environment or society. Our key goal indicators will be related to social impact, so we are preparing impact reports inspired by the Research Excellence Framework report in the UK.”
Rohan Mehra is a STEAM communicator based in Tokyo. He works with universities to improve the depth, breadth, quality, and quantity of their public facing communications output. His main focus is on writing, producing short films, and lecturing post-graduates about research communication. Typical of STEAM communicators, he’s worked in a broad range of roles including as a TV producer, animator, researcher, editor, museum curator, public speaker, and journalist. Alongside these things he’s also taught continuously since the mid 2000’s, running workshops for adults, children, and under-represented groups on film production, animation, and more.
Space to grow in Kazakhstan
By Nick Harland
In brief
- Kazakhstan is expanding foreign branch campuses and tech infrastructure to establish itself as Eurasia's primary higher education hub.
- International partnerships and AI investments are driving rising student retention alongside record growth in international enrolments.
- Long-term success requires spreading growth beyond major cities, easing regulations and building lasting local research capacity.
The first thing you should know about Kazakhstan is that it is big. So big, in fact, that you could fit about five Frances, 11 United Kingdoms or 30 Portugals inside the country. It’s the largest landlocked nation in the world and lies at the almost-exact centre of Eurasia. Simply put, it’s a very big country in a very convenient location.
While interesting geographical bits of trivia, they have an impact on the country’s higher education sector. For one, the country’s central location plays a central role in its higher education strategy. Being as well-connected with Berlin as it is with Beijing means Kazakhstan is positioning itself as an education hub for Eurasia, connecting East and West and attracting students from across the region.
A key tenet of this strategy is to attract foreign universities to set up branch campuses in the country. The idea is that the knowledge, quality of teaching and international links brought by foreign universities can propel Kazakhstan’s own higher education ambitions.
Bringing international education home
Leicester’s De Montfort University (DMU) was the first UK university to set up in Kazakhstan, opening its Almaty campus in 2021.
“We saw Kazakhstan as a particularly interesting opportunity to widen access to UK higher education in Central Asia,” explains Neil Hart, the school’s Associate Director of Transnational Education.
“There was already clear demand among local students and families for high-quality international education, but studying overseas is not an option for everyone. Establishing provision in Kazakhstan enabled students to study for a UK degree in their home country while also having opportunities to engage with the wider DMU community and, where appropriate, study in Leicester.”
DMU Kazakhstan’s first cohort was made up of 145 students, mainly studying business-related subjects. Since then, the university has added new courses in computing, international relations, and art and design. Last October, DMU Kazakhstan celebrated its first cohort of graduates. These are all promising early signs for a university that has also established similarly successful operations in Dubai and Cambodia.
“For DMU, the experience has reinforced that successful transnational education needs to be more than simply exporting a UK degree,” says Hart. “It requires programmes to remain academically rigorous and recognisably British while being relevant to the economic, cultural and employment context of the country in which students are studying.”
Though DMU was the first British university to open a campus in Kazakhstan, it’s not the biggest provider of transnational education in the country. Coventry University launched an Astana campus in 2024, followed by a second in Almaty earlier this year.
For Miras Daulenov, President of Coventry University Kazakhstan, one of their main challenges is attracting young Kazakhs who often favour studying abroad.
Daulenov quotes figures from UNESCO, which state that Kazakhstan is among the top 10 countries in the world for the number of students studying abroad per 100,000 people and among the top 15 in absolute numbers. "We're not saying that studying abroad is wrong,” he says. “I studied abroad and represent a British university in Kazakhstan."
But he believes it's important to retain local students if the country wants to meet its ambition of becoming world leaders in areas such as AI. The ambition is not simply to bring foreign universities into Kazakhstan, but to give more young people a reason to build their futures there.
As it happens, those AI ambitions are also influenced by the country’s geography. AI is a target industry for the country partly because Kazakhstan has the space to build new data centres.
Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov has said that the country's goal is to become “a platform for hosting global digital infrastructure”, and work has already begun on Data Center Valley, a massive AI campus that is set to cover 1,400 hectares — roughly the equivalent of 2,000 football pitches. The project includes a $10 billion deal with US-based AI company Firebird, backed by NVIDIA.
Promisingly, it seems that the country is starting to persuade more local students to study locally. Domestic student numbers have grown by 14 percent in the last three years, whilst Coventry now has more than 850 students across its two Kazakh campuses — a ten-fold increase from 2024, when it enrolled just 84 students at its Astana campus. “To be honest, we expected 800 students in 10 years, but we reached that goal very quickly,” says Daulenov.
Nick Harland is a freelance copywriter, writer and founder of Big Bang Copy. As a freelancer, he has written content for Specsavers, Numan, Ricoh, Hearst and many more. He specialises in education, healthcare and music, but has written about everything from financial services to luxury travel. In 2021, he founded the copywriting agency Big Bang Copy. He works with a small network of freelancers on bigger copywriting projects such as website rewrites or marketing campaigns.
