Nepal is a developing country with a human development index of 0.574 according the the latest report published by the United Nations Human Development Program in 2018. Though it has an educational system which enables its population to achieve an expected 12.2 years of schooling, the mean number of years spent in education is 4.9 according to the latest information. This is primarily due to a high percentage of the country’s population still working and residing in agricultural areas where educational facilities are out of reach. The country is also plagued with relatively high dropout rates, with 26.5 percent of elementary students leaving before finishing their last grade of elementary education. This predominantly affects children from poorer families who need to help their family sustain with farm work, on top of dealing with having long commutes to attend classes (Roach, 2018).
Additionally, the education of girls is still not seen as a priority in some rural households and child marriage is still relatively a common practice even in urban areas. According to the Humans Rights Watch, 37 “percent of girls in Nepal marry before the age of 18, and 10 percent are married by the age of 15” (Human Rights Watch, 2016). With that said, most of Nepali’s youth today receive considerably much better educational opportunities when compared to their parents. Net enrolment rates for elementary education has grown from 66.3 percent in 1997 to 97 percent in 2016. Whilst secondary education grew from 44.9 percent in 2007 to 60.4 percent in 2015 before dropping down again to 54.4 percent in 2016, following the 2015 earthquake (Data.worldbank.org, 2017).
Despite an increasing average uptake in students, school retention rates decrease with each level of education, with retention rates for primary education being at 73.5 percent. Merely 34.6 percent of Nepali population over 25 years old have achieved some level of secondary education (Hdr.undp.org, 2018). This is reflected by the very low tertiary gross enrolment ratio of 14.9 percent in 2015 (Data.worldbank.org, 2016). Due to the aforementioned conditions the literacy rate in the country for ages 15 and above remains perceptively low and stands at only 59.6 percent (Hdr.undp.org, 2018). Even with the now 35,222 elementary and secondary schools, the proportion of schools with access to the internet is 5 percent. This is a barrier which the country as a whole will have to overcome as digital literacy begins to play a larger role in the continued development of nations (Caspersen et al., 2018).
Expanding educational opportunities is a priority of the government, and its current 2016 School Sector Development plan seeks to graduate Nepal From the status of least developed country by 2022 through strengthening access and quality of education.
Tertiary education
Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)
Higher education in Nepal did not evolve before the 20th century. The first university to be opened to the general public, Tribhuvan University, was not founded before 1959, and remained the only university in Nepal until 1986. Today It is the largest university in Nepal enrolling 79 percent of all students (2015/2016) (Koirala, 2016). Since its inception another 9 universities have been built in Nepal, these include. Nepal Sanskrit University (1986), Kathmandu University (1991), Purbanchal University (1994), Pokhara University (1997), Lumbini Buddha University (2005), Agriculture and Forestry University (2010), Mid Western University (2010) Far Western University (2010), Open University of Nepal (2016) and Rajarshi Janak University 2017) (Roach, 2018).
All Universities in Nepal are public institutions, though institutions like Kathmandu, Purbanchal and Pokhara university have a high degree of autonomy akin to that usually
only offered by private institutions. These universities are almost exclusively funded by tuition fees (Hridaya Bajracharya, 2015). While universities are technically public institutions, their campuses (i.e. colleges) are often privately owned. There are therefore two types of colleges in Nepal:
- Constituent campuses / colleges: which are directly managed and finance by a university
- Affiliated campuses / colleges: which are institutions that offer programs that lead to a degree awarded by the affiliated university, but are funded and managed externally. These institutions can be privately owned or publicly subsidised by local communities (Hridaya Bajracharya, 2015).
Community campuses charge tuition fees, but also receive money from the University Grant Commission (UGC), whist on the other hand private campuses receive receive their financing solely from student fees. This enables Private institutions to have greater autonomy and flexibly, albite with the single restraint that they have to offer the same degree programs as their affiliated universities, which determine curricula and asses student examinations through external examinations (Roach, 2018).
Subsequently many of the private colleges are also better funded, and benefit from efficient financial management enabling them to have better facilities and equipment. However the high tuition fees in these private colleges make many of them elitist institutions and inaccessible to large parts of the population. This for profit nature of contributes to the commercialisation of education with the knock on effect of emphasizing quantity over quality.
The number of campus colleges in Nepal has grown rapidly in recent years, and as of 2016 there were 777 private, 532 community and 98 constituent colleges, throughout the country, of which 82.5 percent of them being affiliated to Tribhuvan University. Within that same year 35.6 percent of students were enrolled in private colleges, 30.7 in community colleges and 33.7 percent in constituent colleges (Roach, 2018).
In 2016 when the student enrolment in tertiary education stood at 361,077 an overwhelming majority of these students (88.3 percent) where enrolled in bachelors program, with the number of graduate program enrolment standing at 11.3 percent fo that same year. Less than 0.5 percent were enrolled in advanced graduate and doctoral programs (Hridaya Bajracharya, 2015). This is reflected by the structure of the educational system in Nepal whereby 80 percent of Higher Education Institutions offer only bachelor programs, with the majority of them being private colleges, as they seldom offer programs beyond this level.
The resulting issue created by this system is that there is a growing financial barrier to quality education coupled with specialised advance graduate disciplines only being offered in community and constituent colleges, which lack the financial resources to provide quality infrastructure and adequate training in specialised fields. This can be seen in the distribution of campus programs where business management, financial accounting, education, the humanities and social science constitute 85.8 percent of tertiary education programs. Meanwhile, medicine engineering, research and development programs constitute 6.7 percent of the total campus programs with agriculture and forestry accounting for less than 1 percent of all campus offerings (Hridaya Bajracharya, 2015). The increase in management education in Nepal represents a growth pattern of a growing working population and a need for increased Human Resource Development, as well as Leadership Skills training.