Schools & universities in Surin.

The anchor of higher education in Surin. It was established on 29 September 1973 as a teachers' college under the Department of Teacher Education, became Surin Rajabhat Institute by royal conferral in February 1992, and attained full university status under the Rajabhat University Act 2004 with effect from 15 June 2004. It runs six faculties — Humanities and Social Sciences, Education, Science and Technologies, Management Science, Industrial Technology, and Agriculture and Agricultural Industry — offering bachelor's, master's and doctoral programmes. BAANLYY has not verified current enrolment figures and does not publish numbers it has not checked. For a province routinely written off as rural, a full university with a doctoral tier is a real institutional anchor.

Rajamangala University of Technology Isan operates one of its five campuses here — the others are Nakhon Ratchasima, Khon Kaen, Kalasin and Sakon Nakhon — established under the Rajamangala University of Technology Act 2004 and commencing in January 2005. The Surin campus occupies about 1,500 rai a few kilometres out of the district centre on the Surin–Prasat road, and its student population is one of the drivers of the local rental market. It is worth noticing which road that is, because a second university sits on the same highway: Chalermkarnchana University, below.

This page used to say only that a campus existed and that we had not verified its programmes. We have now checked, and the answer is larger than the old wording implied. MCU Surin is a วิทยาเขต — a full regional campus, not an outstation — created after the Surin sangha resolved in 1987 to establish one, and it houses Surin Buddhist College within it. Its own prospectus lists bachelor's degrees in Buddhist Studies, Public Administration and Political Science plus two Bachelor of Education routes, in Social Studies and in Teaching English; master's degrees in Buddhist Studies, Public Administration and Educational Administration and Social Studies; and a doctorate in Buddhist Studies. The Bachelor of Education in Teaching English is the detail a relocating family should register: this province trains its own English teachers, which is not true of every Isan province of this size. The campus is separately notable for running two academic journals and a national conference. It is a monastic university, so the student body and the atmosphere differ from the Rajabhat and RMUTI campuses; lay students are admitted to several programmes.

A private university under the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation, founded on 7 September 2004, with a campus in Surin on the Surin–Prasat road southwest of the town; the university's own campus page places it at roughly 14.804°N, 103.453°E. Its degree fields nationally are nursing, community public health, occupational health and safety, political science, law, accounting, management and business computing. One thing is worth stating plainly because the name gives no clue either way: this is not a Bangkok university with a provincial outpost. Chalermkarnchana's central campus is in Sisaket, one province east, and Surin is one of its regional campuses. The nearest private-university seat to Surin is therefore in lower Isaan, not in the capital. BAANLYY has not verified which faculties are taught at the Surin campus specifically as opposed to the university as a whole, and does not publish a faculty list it has not checked campus by campus.

Thailand's open university maintains a สาขาวิทยบริการเฉลิมพระเกียรติ in Surin — one of twenty-three such regional branches nationally — with its own site, its own registration and examination function, and its own local news bulletin. The branch's own pages name Law, Business Administration, Political Science and Mass Communication, and promote the Pre-degree route by which secondary students bank credits before matriculating. This matters more than its size suggests: it is the province's open-admission, work-alongside-study degree route, and it is the one a working adult can actually use. One honest caveat — the branch site's most recent news items date from 2018, so confirm current intake, faculties and examination dates with the branch directly rather than from the web.

The degree awarder that a search for universities never returns, because it does not sit under the higher-education ministry at all. Boromarajonani College of Nursing, Surin is part of the Faculty of Nursing of Praboromarajchanok Institute, the Ministry of Public Health's own degree-conferring institute, and it awards the Bachelor of Nursing Science. It has published its own peer-reviewed journal, Rachawadeesarn, in the Thai Citation Index for years. For a province whose largest single employer of graduates is a 914-bed regional hospital, a nursing school in the same town is not a footnote — it is the pipeline. BAANLYY could not load the college's own website, which returned an empty page to us, so we publish no address, no contact number and no intake figures for it; ask the college directly.

Surin Technical College is the province's main technical institution, and it is worth noting for a reason beyond education: it carries the densest cluster of rental listings anywhere in Surin, which tells you how large its student body is relative to the town. Surin Vocational College is a separate institution operating alongside it. The point most guides get wrong is what these colleges lead to. Below-degree certificates and diplomas are taught in the college; the bachelor's degree in applied technology is conferred by the regional vocational institute the colleges belong to — for this part of Isaan, Institute of Vocational Education Northeast Region 5, which is seated in Nakhon Ratchasima and holds its own convocation rehearsal there before graduands travel to Thammasat's Rangsit campus for the royal degree ceremony alongside every other vocational institute in the country. So a Surin vocational student's degree runs through Korat, exactly like the province's referral hospital tier and its international schooling. BAANLYY could not open that institute's member register and subject list, which it publishes only as a download, so we do not print which degree subjects the two Surin colleges are approved to teach.

Two large government secondaries anchor the town. Sirindhorn School, established in 1941 and formerly simply "School Surin", sits in central Surin under Secondary Educational Service Area Office 33, and runs a Science-Maths-English stream, an Advance Program for high achievers, a Language Program with Japanese and Chinese, and — most relevant to a relocating family — an English Program running since 2004, which the school describes as the first English Immersion Program in Surin province. The English Program covers Grade 7 to Grade 12 with two classes per year level of roughly 20 to 30 students each, which puts the whole EP at a few hundred pupils rather than a few thousand, and it is staffed by a mix of English-speaking teachers of various nationalities and Thai teachers. Surawittayakarn School is the province's other flagship academic secondary, offering mathematics, science and languages; its founding date and size are unverified by BAANLYY, so we describe rather than characterise it. One caution: the figure of approximately 8,000 students that appears on Sirindhorn's own English Program page refers to the whole school, not the EP, and is implausibly high for a single Thai secondary, so we do not repeat it as fact.

BAANLYY could verify no full international-curriculum school anywhere in Surin province, and we have now chased down the one candidate that used to make that answer look uncertain. A British-curriculum school called The Surin International School does exist, with a live website, an active Facebook page and a Head of School — and it is in Ampang, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Its own site is titled for Kuala Lumpur, its contact numbers are a Malaysian mobile and a 03 Klang Valley landline, and its footer states that it is wholly owned by Beyond Academics Sdn. Bhd., company number 1206576-T. It has no connection to Surin province in Thailand. That is worth stating plainly, because it is the single result most likely to appear when a relocating family searches, and because a Thai-language search on the same term returns the same Malaysian school. Wikipedia's by-province list of international schools in Thailand, around 170 entries, has zero for Surin. The nearest verifiable options are the four in Nakhon Ratchasima, plus one each in Khon Kaen, Ubon Ratchathani and Roi Et; Buriram has none listed. Within Surin, the closest equivalent is the English Program at Sirindhorn School. For a family that requires an English-medium international track, this is a decision about which province you live in.