Rural disadvantage in the context of centralised university admissions: a multiple case study of Georgia and Kazakhstan

The extraordinary expansion of higher education has not been accompanied by more equitable access to universities for various disadvantaged groups. Rural youth is at the heart of this study that draws on secondary data and literature to examine rural-urban disparities in higher education access in two high-participation systems in the Caucasus and Central Asia. This multiple case study uses a historical-comparative lens to offer a synthesis of the evidence on the subnational and cross-national differences in the three domains of higher education access – academic preparedness, HE aspirations, and HEI/programme choice-making – to point to the existence of prominent rural-urban disparities in Georgia and Kazakhstan. The study contributes to an improved understanding of the structural-territorial foundations of inequalities in higher education access and charts future directions for policy. The framework used in this study can be applied to examining disparities in access to higher education in other national contexts.