The Current State and Development Trends of the Higher Education Services Market in the Republic of Uzbekistan

Analyses of national higher education markets frequently focus on the scale of growth, while the underlying composition and structural characteristics of that growth may provide additional insights. This article examines the nature of market growth and demonstrates how its composition affects the interpretation of structural change. Three analytical constructs are applied to a five-year segment-level panel: market concentration and its trend; the composition of growth between market entry and the expansion of incumbent institutions; and asymmetric convergence, introduced in this study to distinguish between dimensions in which market segments are becoming more similar and those in which differences are increasing. Enrolment increased from 361 thousand to 644 thousand between 2020 and 2024, while the number of institutions rose from 90 to 174. At the same time, mean institution size decreased from 4.01 thousand to 3.70 thousand students. These results indicate that market growth was driven predominantly by the entry of new institutions rather than by an increase in the average scale of existing institutions, with 64.1% of the additional 283 thousand enrolments attributable to institutions that entered the market during the period. Market concentration decreased across all measures and throughout the period: the segment-level Herfindahl index declined from 0.4503 to 0.3216, entropy increased from 0.9529 to 1.2307, and the institution-level concentration index decreased by 42.1% to a level equivalent to 123 equal-sized institutions. By 2024, non-state segments accounted for 54.6% of institutions and 27.0% of enrolments, corresponding to a 27.6-percentage-point difference between their shares of institutions and enrolments. The results also reveal asymmetric convergence. The coefficient of variation in tuition across segments decreased from 0.700 to 0.604, while the tuition spread narrowed from 4.88 to 3.95. By contrast, the coefficient of variation in enrolment yield increased from 0.199 to 0.240. Thus, the segments became more similar in terms of tuition levels while exhibiting greater differences in enrolment yield. Enrolment-weighted market yield decreased by 4.7 percentage points over the period, with a decline observed across all segments included in the analysis.