This article explores the impact of market metaphors and mechanisms on higher education in Kyrgyzstan. Drawing upon recent anthropological literature on the local meanings of market reforms in post-socialist contexts, as well as work in the field of educational policy that has focused attention on the "local spaces" in which curricular and administrative reforms are encountered, this study will explore the ways in which languages of market have been received and appropriated by the students, teachers and administrators who have to negotiate what Kyrgyzstani higher education reform means in practice. Specifically, the article examines how practices and valuations of higher education have been affected by the opening of commercial ("kontraktnyie") departments in nominally state universities, by the transformation of curricular content and teaching practice in the social sciences, and by the severing of the Soviet-era link between higher education and guaranteed professional employment. Drawing upon interviews and participant observation, it will suggest that we need to move beyond the overdrawn dichotomies in which contestations over the post-Soviet educational space are generally cast ("East" vs. "West"; "Tradition" vs. "Innovation") to focus on the complex ways in which educational "reform" is practised and interpreted in specific institutional settings. (Contains 19 notes.)