OCA#59 EDUCATION WELCOME WORD

Dear Reader,

I was talking recently with a hiring manager at one of Astana’s energy companies in March who told me something that has stayed with me. “I stopped reading cover letters six months ago,” he said. “I can’t tell if I’m reading the applicant or ChatGPT.” He paused, then added something I found even more striking. “And honestly, for some of the roles we’re recruiting for now, I’m not sure it matters — because in two years, the role itself will probably be done by AI anyway.” He wasn’t complaining. He was simply describing a new reality — one that has arrived faster than most universities, schools, and policymakers were prepared to handle.

The degree paradox has been building for years. A university qualification has never been more common, more expensive, or more questioned. Across Central Asia and beyond, millions of young people invest years of their lives — and considerable sums of money — into credentials that were designed for a world that no longer quite exists. The industrial-age university was built on a simple contract: absorb knowledge, demonstrate it in writing, receive a certificate that signals to employers you are trainable and you will get a job. That promise is now fracturing.

Artificial intelligence has accelerated the fracture in two directions at once. On one side, it has made the traditional written assignment — the essay, or the report — almost impossible to verify as a genuine demonstration of a student’s own thinking. On the other, it is rapidly reshaping the very jobs that graduates are hoping to walk into. The entry-level roles that once absorbed new graduates — research tasks, first drafts, data processing, basic analysis — are precisely the roles most exposed to automation. A degree that trained you for those jobs is beginning to look like a wasteful preparation for positions that may not exist.

Yet here is where I think the conversation needs to shift. The answer is not to fight AI in education, but to teach with it. The students who will thrive in the next decade are not those who avoided AI tools, but those who learned to think alongside them — to interrogate outputs, to know when to trust and when to question. They will be the ones who bring judgment, context, and genuine human understanding to problems that a language model can only approximate. This is a new kind of literacy, and most institutions are only beginning to understand what it demands of them. The energy sector in Kazakhstan knows this already — it is actively looking for graduates who can work with AI-driven modelling and simulation tools, not graduates who have simply memorised the theory behind them. Education must catch up with that reality.

For Central Asia, this is both a moment of challenge and a genuine opportunity. The region’s universities are not weighed down by centuries of entrenched tradition. They have the flexibility to adapt, to experiment, and to design programmes that place AI fluency at their core rather than as an afterthought. The question is whether the will and the vision exist to match that flexibility.

This OCA issue explores many of these tensions in rich and sometimes surprising detail. Andrew Wachtel sets out six scenarios for the future of the university in the age of AI — none of them comfortable, all of them worth reading. Jorge Rey Valzacchi reframes the plagiarism debate entirely, arguing that the real question is no longer “did the student write this?” but “did the student think this?” Our cover interview with Lidia Belozerova-Solonovich is a timely reminder that truly transformative education has always begun with something simpler — the commitment to see each child as an individual. And from across the region, contributors from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and beyond explore what smart agriculture, vocational training, and the rise of micro-credentials mean for a generation that will need to keep learning long after they leave the classroom.

As ever, there are no easy answers in these pages. But there are some very good questions. I hope you find them as absorbing as I have.

Yours,
Nick Rowan
Editor-in-Chief
Open Central Asia Magazine