Schools & universities in Loei.

How many places in Loei award a degree? Five, under three authorities

An earlier version of this page said Loei had two university campuses. That was wrong, and the document that corrects it is the province's own. The Loei Provincial Education Office publishes an annual information booklet — 'Educational Information, Loei Province, academic year 2568', document 5/2568, September 2568 — and it is a register rather than a directory: it enumerates all 830 educational institutions in the province under eight parent authorities, with student and staff counts for each. Its higher-education entry lists THREE institutions under the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation: Loei Rajabhat University, Mahamakut Buddhist University's Sri Lanchang campus, and Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University's Loei Buddhist College — a campus this page did not previously name at all. Its own table of institutions by level of study confirms the count as three at higher-education level, and separately records TWO institutions teaching from the vocational certificate through to a bachelor's degree, which are vocational colleges rather than universities and sit under a different ministry. So the honest answer is five places in this province at which you can take a bachelor's degree, under three separate authorities, not two campuses. The same register puts 7,434 students across the three universities — 6,925 undergraduates and 509 postgraduates — with 355 academic and support staff, and 9,185 students across the ten vocational colleges. For scale: 830 institutions, 129,185 students and 8,627 teachers in a province of 631,063 people.

Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University, Loei Buddhist College — the campus we had missed

Thailand has exactly two Buddhist universities, and Loei has a campus of BOTH. The one this page previously omitted is Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University's Loei Buddhist College — วิทยาลัยสงฆ์เลย — at 119 Moo 5, tambon Si Song Rak, Mueang Loei 42100, on 042 039 630, with a separate line, 042 039 629, for its monk-teacher coordination centre. It is in the provincial district, about six kilometres north of the town centre, and it appears on the provincial education office's higher-education register alongside Loei Rajabhat and Mahamakut. Its own site organises teaching around three bachelor's-level departments — Teaching Thai, Buddhist Studies and Political Science — and a graduate school offering a Master of Arts in Buddhist Studies, a master's in Buddhist educational administration and a Master of Political Science. Note what it is and is not: MCU classifies Loei as a Buddhist COLLEGE rather than one of its twelve campuses, which is a rank below Mahamakut's Sri Lanchang, and like Sri Lanchang its intake is oriented to monks, novices and lay students in that tradition rather than to expatriates. We are not presenting it as a general-purpose alternative. But a province where both national Buddhist universities operate, one of them running political science and teacher-training degrees to master's level, is a materially different place from the one this page described, and omitting it understated Loei.

The vocational degree route — Loei Technical College has awarded bachelor's degrees since 2014

This is the finding that most changes what the province offers a school-leaver, and it is one a search for 'universities in Loei' never returns. Loei Technical College — 272 Charoen Rat Road, tambon Kut Pong, Mueang Loei 42000, on 042 811 591 — is not only a certificate school. Its own history timeline records that it began teaching at BACHELOR'S level (the Bachelor of Technology, ทล.บ.) in 2557, starting with Construction Technology (Civil); added electrical and mechanical bachelor's programmes between 2558 and 2561; and has since added a bachelor's in production technology. Its own summary block states three levels of study — vocational certificate, higher vocational certificate and bachelor's degree — and its newsletter records staff attending the royal degree-conferment ceremony for graduates of the vocational education institutes at Thammasat University's Rangsit centre for the 2568 academic year, and running a credit-transfer scheme into the Bachelor of Technology for 2569. The distinction that matters is who confers: the college teaches, but the DEGREE is awarded by the Institute of Vocational Education, North-East Region 1, of which the college's own site declares itself a member. That institute serves the upper-Isaan provinces and is not seated in Loei, so a Loei vocational degree routes out of the province exactly as its hospital tier and its international schooling do. The provincial register records two such colleges in Loei; we verified this one from its own published timeline and did not identify the second, and we would rather say so than guess. The college is also the oldest institution on this page by some distance — the Ministry of Education opened it as Loei Carpentry School on 17 July 2481, on the bank of the Loei River in front of the municipal hall, with two teachers and sixteen pupils; flooding destroyed the site and it moved to Ban Tiu, where it still is, on what is now 25 rai 2 ngan.

Ramkhamhaeng: no campus here, but Loei is one of its 41 exam centres

Ramkhamhaeng University is Thailand's open university and the default route to a degree for adults in provinces without one, so its presence or absence is worth establishing precisely rather than by search. It has 23 regional campuses. We read the full list: in the Northeast they are Udon Thani, Nakhon Phanom, Nong Bua Lamphu, Khon Kaen, Chaiyaphum, Amnat Charoen, Nakhon Ratchasima, Surin, Buriram and Sisaket. Loei is NOT among them — a named absence from a published list, which is a stronger statement than a search that found nothing. But the answer does not end there, and this is where a lot of guides stop too early. Ramkhamhaeng also runs 41 regional examination centres for students who do not live near a campus, and Loei IS one of them: centre number 40, held at Municipal School 5 Ban Nong Phak Kam in Loei town, on 042 812 385. That school appears independently on the provincial education office's own register of local-authority schools, so the venue is real and in the provincial capital. The practical shape, then: you can enrol as a regional Ramkhamhaeng student and sit your examinations in Loei town, but for in-person registration, lectures and registry business the nearest campus is Nong Bua Lamphu, roughly ninety kilometres east — which, unusually for this province, is closer than Udon Thani. Exam centres are revised, so check the current registration handbook before relying on centre 40.

Loei Rajabhat University — the province's main campus

Loei Rajabhat University is the education story of this province, and its own history page gave us more detail than most. It was founded in 1973 as Loei Teachers' College under the Ministry of Education, established on 29 September 1973 and funded through a World Bank loan programme, on about 323 rai at Thung Khum Thong roughly five kilometres from the town on Route 201 — the Loei–Chiang Khan road — on land given by the provincial administrative organisation together with adjacent villagers' land. Teaching began on 10 June 1976 with a first intake of 640 students on the certificate programme and 47 lecturers, transferred from the Udon Thani, Pibulsongkram and Nakhon Sawan teachers' colleges plus new hires. Higher-certificate teaching followed in 1977, an in-service teacher cohort of 252 across six training centres in Loei and Khon Kaen provinces in 1978–79, and the first two-year bachelor's degree in 1980. Non-teaching disciplines were added from 1985. On 25 January 1995 King Bhumibol bestowed the name Rajabhat Institute, and the Rajabhat Institute Loei Act of the same year made it a higher-education institution for local development; on 15 June 2004 the King bestowed the name Rajabhat University. It now runs five faculties — Education, Humanities and Social Sciences, Science and Technology, Engineering and Industrial Technology, and Management Science — with master's programmes from 1998 and doctorates in Regional Development Strategy and Educational Administration, an MBA from 2010–11 and a logistics management degree from 2015. Its main address is 234 Loei–Chiang Khan Road in tambon Mueang, and it also operates a Khon Kaen education centre, a Logistics and Border Trade Study Centre, a demonstration school and a business incubator. Student numbers are NOT published on its own history page. An earlier version of this page noted that a directory put its enrolment in the 7,000 to 7,999 band and declined to publish that as fact — which was the right call, because the provincial education office's 2568 register gives 7,434 students as the total across ALL THREE of the province's universities, 6,925 undergraduates and 509 postgraduates. In other words the directory's figure for one campus is close to the province's figure for three, which is exactly the shape a number takes when it has been attached to the wrong entity. Loei Rajabhat is the largest of the three by a wide margin, but we still publish no figure for it alone, because no source we can verify gives one.

A medical faculty arriving in 2028

The most consequential education development in the province is medical, and it is dated. On 28 April 2026 the Cabinet approved the establishment of a Faculty of Medicine at Nakhon Phanom University, with a budget of 2,502 million baht over ten years running from fiscal 2027 to 2036. The project explicitly includes upgrading three hospitals into clinical medical education centres — Nakhon Phanom, LOEI and Yasothon — with the first medical-student intake in the 2028 academic year and more than seventy doctors expected to have qualified by 2036, with 216 in the pipeline. For a province of 632,000 people that is a genuine structural addition, and it changes what the local education sector looks like a decade out. Note the partner, because it is not the obvious one: Nakhon Phanom, on the far side of Isaan on the Mekong, rather than Khon Kaen, which hosts the region's largest medical school and is the answer almost everyone would guess. Loei is being wired into an upper-Mekong pipeline rather than the Khon Kaen one.

International schools — a verified absence, not a research gap

There is no international-curriculum school anywhere in Loei province, and we want to be precise about the strength of that claim. We read Wikipedia's list of international schools in Thailand IN FULL, sorted by province. The provinces represented are Bangkok, Chai Nat, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Chon Buri, Chumphon, Khon Kaen, Koh Lanta, Krabi, Lampang, Nakhon Ratchasima, Nonthaburi, Pathum Thani, Phitsanulok, Phuket, Prachuap Khiri Khan, Rayong, Roi Et, Samut Prakan, Samut Sakhon, Saraburi, Songkhla, Surat Thani, Ubon Ratchathani and Udon Thani. There is no Loei entry at all. That makes this a VERIFIED ABSENCE rather than something we simply failed to find — a distinction we care about, because in other provinces we have had to report 'could not verify' instead, and the two mean quite different things for a family making a decision. If you have children who need an international curriculum, Loei does not have one and will not surprise you with one.

The nearest verified alternative, and why we name only this one

Our rule is that we name an international school only when we have fetched its own pages and read its own statement of its own curriculum — naming an unverified school is as unhelpful as inventing one. On that basis the nearest option we will name is Udon Thani International School, at 222 Moo 2 Mittraphap Road, tambon Kut Sa, Mueang Udon Thani, telephone +66 42 110 379, about 150 kilometres east of Loei. Its own academics page states that it is an IB World School using a British-influenced curriculum taught through inquiry-based learning: the Early Years Foundation Stage for ages two to five; a Primary Years Programme for ages five to eleven across six levels, based on the National Curriculum of England and taught through the IB PYP; the IB Middle Years Programme for years seven to eleven; and the IB Diploma Programme for years twelve and thirteen. The page displays IB World School authorisation for PYP, MYP and DP, CIS accreditation, ISAT membership and ONESQA accreditation, and the site navigation lists a boarding option. Wikipedia's list also names a school in Khon Kaen and a second Udon Thani entry, but we did not fetch either school's own pages and so we do not describe their curricula. At 150 kilometres, Udon Thani is a boarding or relocation decision, not a daily commute — model it honestly before comparing Loei's rents with anywhere else.

No international school does not mean no English-medium classroom

These are two different sentences, and conflating them has misled readers of guides like this one in province after province. Loei has no international-curriculum school; it does not follow that no child in Loei is taught in English. Take the provincial secondary school, Loei Pittayakhom, at 237/9 Loei–Dan Sai Road in tambon Kut Pong — formed on 24 March 2515 by merging the boys' and girls' provincial schools onto the girls' school's 81-rai site, and now one of Thailand's very large secondary schools. From its own website: it maintains a FOREIGN-TEACHER department in its staff directory alongside its Thai subject departments; it runs special-programme classes ('hong rian phiset') with an admissions round and a fee schedule separate from its ordinary classes, taking applicants at both M.1 and M.4 through its own online admissions system; it hosts one of the Ministry of Education's Human Capital Excellence Centres, the network built specifically to raise English-language teaching; and it puts every M.3 and M.6 cohort through CEFR assessment via Oxford English Testing and issues the certificates. Now the limit of what we can say. We could not open the school's own announcement setting out those special programmes — it is a Google Drive document — and its loeipit.ac.th domain returned an empty body to us, so we do not describe the programmes' names, hours or subject splits, and we do not repeat the third-party encyclopaedia entry that labels one of its buildings an EP block. That is our tooling gap, stated as ours. The practical point stands: if you are weighing Loei against a province with an international school, the comparison is not 'English versus no English', it is a Thai-curriculum school with foreign teachers and CEFR testing versus an international curriculum, and those differ in what qualification your child leaves with. Ask the school directly which subjects are taught in English and by whom.

Princess Chulabhorn Science High School Loei — the province's strongest school, and it is free

An earlier version of this page noted this school as existing and then declined to describe it, because we had not read its own pages. We have now read them, and the omission was doing readers a disservice, because on any measure this is the most academically serious school in the province and one of the strongest in the upper Northeast. Princess Chulabhorn Science High School Loei — โรงเรียนวิทยาศาสตร์จุฬาภรณราชวิทยาลัย เลย, originally Princess Chulabhorn's College, Loei — sits on 160 rai at 129 Moo 5, tambon That, in CHIANG KHAN district on the Huai Phot–Phu Bo Bit rural road. Note the district: its own history page states it is about 28 kilometres from the provincial government centre, so this is not a school in Loei town, and if it matters to you the drive is real. It was announced in the 1994 batch of the national Chulabhorn schools programme, took its first intake of 90 students in the 1995 academic year across M.1 and M.4, and had its foundation stone laid simultaneously with all twelve original Chulabhorn schools at 14:49 on Wednesday 17 January 1996. It is co-educational, its founding day is 2 June, and its colours are navy and orange. It is a science SCHOOL, not a science stream inside an ordinary school — a distinction its own director draws explicitly, and it means full standard-specification laboratories rather than shared rooms.

What it actually costs, who can apply, and how hard it is to get in

The published detail here is unusually complete because the school's director set it out in a public briefing carried by the Public Relations Department's Dan Sai station, and the numbers matter. Students are GOVERNMENT SCHOLARS: the school receives a state subsidy of 84,000 baht per student per year, which covers meals, uniforms, PE kit, sleepwear, bedding, laundry, milk and competition entry fees — so there is NO TUITION FEE. Students board, in separate male and female dormitories, going home roughly once a month for three or four days; the school's own older history page still describes both boarding and day options, so confirm the current arrangement directly rather than assuming either. Classes are capped at 24 students. M.1 takes four classes, 96 students; M.4 takes six classes, 144 students. The catchment is regional rather than provincial: students studying in Loei, Nong Khai, Nong Bua Lamphu, Bueng Kan, Sakon Nakhon, Udon Thani and Khon Kaen. Entry is by examination in two subjects only, science and mathematics, weighted 60:40 toward mathematics at M.1 and 50:50 at M.4; M.1 applications go through the Chulabhorn schools' own portal at admission.pcshs.ac.th and M.4 applications through Mahidol Wittayanusorn School at mwit.ac.th. The application window is normally August to September. The director is blunt about two further things worth repeating: there are no placed or connected admissions, and a student who withdraws after enrolling is liable for 1.5 times the state subsidy received.

Why this school matters to a relocating family — and its honest limits

For a foreign family, the relevant question about a Thai state school is usually language and exit options, and this one answers both better than almost any provincial school in Thailand. Every student sits a CEFR English assessment once per semester, M.1 students take a CB-TEB baseline test on arrival, Japanese and Chinese are also taught, and staff — administrators included — train with University of Otago academics in New Zealand and sit the same CEFR testing. Its curriculum is modelled on Mahidol Wittayanusorn School's and revised jointly each year. Its academic mentors are Khon Kaen University and Chulabhorn Royal Academy, with Loei Rajabhat University also involved. It runs exchanges with Shizuoka Kita science high school and Kumamoto KOSEN in Japan, and M.3 students can compete for Thai government scholarships to spend seven years at a Japanese KOSEN institute through to an engineering degree. Now the limits, stated plainly. This is a Thai-medium school with strong English, NOT an international-curriculum school — it does not award IGCSEs, A-levels, an IB Diploma or a US high-school diploma, and nothing on this page should be read as suggesting otherwise. Entry is by competitive Thai-language science and mathematics examination against the strongest students in seven provinces, which realistically means a child already schooled in Thai. And it is in Chiang Khan district, not Loei town. If your child fits that profile it is an outstanding and genuinely free option; if they need an international curriculum, the province still has none and Udon Thani remains the answer.

Mahamakut Buddhist University, Sri Lanchang — the other Buddhist campus

An earlier version of this page said a Mahamakut Buddhist University campus appeared in Loei on a rental portal's facet but that we could not confirm which district it sits in, and that beyond Loei Rajabhat we had verified no other university campus in the province. Both statements are now superseded, and we read the campus's own site to do it. Mahamakut Buddhist University, Sri Lanchang Campus (มหาวิทยาลัยมหามกุฏราชวิทยาลัย วิทยาเขตศรีล้านช้าง) is MBU's SEVENTH campus, formally established on 28 March 1995 at Wat Si Sutthawat in MUEANG LOEI district — so it is in the provincial town, not out in a district — at 253/7 Wisuthithep Road, tambon Kut Pong, Loei 42000, on 042 813028 and 042 830434. It began in 1993 as a classroom of MBU's Isan campus in Khon Kaen, teaching one Buddhist studies class and one education class to a first cohort of 80 monks and novices in a temple pavilion, and borrowing its lecturers from Loei Rajabhat University; its first purpose-built teaching block, the three-storey twenty-four-classroom Luang Pu Si Chan 90th Anniversary Building, opened in 1997, the same year MBU became a state-supervised university by Act of Parliament. Its own course listing shows bachelor's programmes in Buddhist Studies for Development, Political Science and teaching degrees in Thai, ENGLISH and Social Studies; master's programmes in Buddhist Studies, Political Science and Educational Administration; and doctorates in Educational Administration and Political Science. It is a Buddhist university and its intake is oriented to monks, novices and lay students in that tradition rather than to expatriates, so we are not presenting it as a general-purpose alternative — but a province with three university campuses, one of them running English-teaching degrees, is a different place from a province with one, and the earlier page understated Loei twice over — first by missing this campus, then by missing Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya's Loei Buddhist College as well.

The rest of the Thai school system, and what we still do not publish

Loei's Thai school system covers 14 districts, 89 subdistricts and 839 villages, and the provincial education office's 2568 register gives its actual shape: 391 primary schools across three primary service areas, 31 secondary schools under the Loei–Nong Bua Lamphu secondary service area teaching 24,010 pupils, 24 PRIVATE schools with 11,207 pupils between them, 27 local-authority schools, 15 monastic schools, 8 border-patrol-police schools in the remote districts, and 303 early-childhood development centres. The private figure is the one most relevant to a relocating family, because a quarter of the province's pre-primary pupils and a sixth of its primary pupils are in private schools — a real alternative sector, even without an international curriculum in it. Beyond the schools described above we still do not name individual private or Thai state schools or assert what curriculum any of them runs, because we have not verified any individual school's intake policy or language of instruction, and a list of names without those details would suggest a breadth of choice we cannot evidence. That is a smaller gap than it was — the two schools most worth knowing about in this province are now described from their own sources — but it is still a gap, and it is one you close by visiting. Shortlist in person, ask each school directly about language of instruction and about how a foreign child transfers in and later transfers out, and do not treat a directory listing as evidence that a programme exists.

Loei schools FAQ

Sources & References

• Educational Information, Loei Province, academic year 2568 (document 5/2568) — Loei Provincial Education Office, Ministry of Education
• Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University, Loei Buddhist College — contact and departments (own site)
• Loei Technical College — college history and programme timeline (own site)
• Loei Pittayakhom School — staff departments, special-programme admissions and CEFR testing (own site)
• Ramkhamhaeng University — the 23 regional campuses and 41 regional examination centres
• Princess Chulabhorn Science High School Loei — school history and location (own site)
• PCSHS Loei admissions, funding and boarding — the director's briefing, Public Relations Department (Radio Thailand Dan Sai)
• Mahamakut Buddhist University, Sri Lanchang Campus — campus history (own site)
• Loei Rajabhat University — university history
• List of international schools in Thailand — Wikipedia
• Udon Thani International School — curriculum
• Cabinet approves a Faculty of Medicine at Nakhon Phanom University — The Coverage
• Loei province — Wikipedia
• Tourism Authority of Thailand

BAANLYY names an international school only where we have read that school's own statement of its own curriculum on its own pages. Schools named on third-party lists but not individually verified are acknowledged as existing and left undescribed.

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