OREANDA-NEWS. May 15, 2014. Employment of college graduates increased by 10 percent in Kazakhstan. It has been announced by Minister of Education and Science Aslan Sarinzhipov at a briefing in the Central Communications Service today. According to him, budgets for technical and vocational education increased almost twice during three years - from 52 billion tenge in 2010 to 91 billion tenge in 2013. Funds for equipping college workshops increased six times (from 800 million tenge in 2010 to 5.5 billion tenge in 2013).

But despite this, the Minister said, there is an imbalance in human resources in the regions.

"As a result of regional imbalances in the south and west of the country there is a redundancy of manpower resources, while there is a shortage in the northern and eastern regions," he said.

In the coming years, he emphasized, these proportions are likely to worsen unless specific measures are undertaken.

"We have a deficit of nearly seven thousand places in vocational education in the south. In the colleges of the northern and eastern regions - four thousand," he added.

"Placement of state order will be made this year and it will focus on technical professions, education, health care," Minister said.

According to him, now the main part of student body studying by state order is in technical specialties.

Currently, Kazakhstan has 130 universities; 500 thousand bachelors are trained, including 142 thousand students are given grants. As a result of measures to improve the quality and optimize the universities, their network was reduced by 20 units over the past two years.