The establishment of internal quality assurance (QA) units has become a near-universal feature of university administration worldwide, yet little is known about how such units differ between higher education systems at different stages of development. Purpose – to map and compare dedicated quality assurance and institutional research units in 103 higher education institutions of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the 100 universities of the QS World University Rankings. Methodology – structured content analysis of official institutional websites in the Kazakh, Russian and English languages, recording unit presence, naming, staffing, declared functions and contact channels for 203 institutions, followed by keyword-assisted functional coding of unit mandates. Originality/value – the study offers the first census-level structural comparison of internal QA units between a post-Soviet higher education system and the universities of the global top 100, and provides an empirical benchmark for national quality assurance policy. Findings – Kazakhstani universities exhibit near-total structural isomorphism: a dedicated QA unit was identified in 102 of 103 institutions (99.0%), but the units are small (median of 3 staff members) and their declared functions concentrate on student surveys, accreditation support, ISO-based quality management systems, internal audit and academic integrity control. Among the QS Top 100, only 52% of universities maintain an identifiable stand-alone central unit; such units are substantially larger (median of 12 staff members) and are predominantly configured as institutional research and decision-support offices. The article concludes that Kazakhstani QA units operate mainly as compliance-oriented structures, whereas leading universities either embed quality in distributed governance or maintain analytics-driven institutional research capacity,

quality assurance; institutional research; higher education; Kazakhstan; QS World University Rankings; institutional isomorphism; university governance