Nepal’s higher education is already in a deep doldrums. Questions around the quality and availability of courses and an incessant mass exodus of youths for university education are a few indicators of the looming crisis. According to the latest official figures, during the first half of the current fiscal year alone, 54,000 students exited the country. The national exchequer bled out nearly half a billion dollars from foreign currency reserves to ‘import’ educational services.

However, these outcomes are hardly surprising in light of the absolute nonchalance of the State in all possible aspects, including legal, institutional, and economic, that impact the country’s higher education. The country lacks a well-articulated, comprehensive higher education policy framework with a defined roadmap and objectives. The only leading light that seems operative at present is the Higher Education Policy 2014. The much-awaited Higher Education Bill, prepared by the government to moot into the federal parliament for ratification, ideally to address these long-standing policy voids, turned out to be fundamentally unacademic and, thus, it faces extreme backlashes.

The Ministry of Education has called the draft ‘preliminary’ and uploaded it on its website, asking for provision-specific amendments. But the problem seems to be not only in a specific policy but the very design of it, as it is deemed to be antithetical to academic freedom. As such, it’s being said that the objective ‘of increasing opportunities for research and innovation in higher education to prepare high-quality and internationally competitive human resources necessary for building a prosperous nation’ appears unattainable.

The gaps

Nepal’s higher education today faces mainly three concurrent challenges: Chronic underinvestment, political meddling, and intrusion into academic freedom. Nepal spends only about 3.5 percent of its GDP on education on average, and only one-fourth of it goes into higher education. Over eighty percent of the higher education allocation goes to a single government-owned institution, Tribhuvan University.

The very philosophy of the state’s spending on education is counterintuitive. Successive governments openly allowed private and institutional investments in both school and college education. However, allowing private universities to open is still out of policy consideration. Instead, the government seems determined to publicly fund the entire higher education. At least, the proposed bill has not envisioned the prospect of private investment in higher education.

Political interference is meted out from both ends. From the top, barring a couple of new ones, in all degree-awarding higher education institutions, the prime minister, the minister or the chief minister (in provinces) is the ex-officio chancellor or chairperson. In appointing each vice-chancellor and critical office-bearers in these institutions, political affiliation rules the roost over the candidates’ academic achievements and leadership quality.

From the bottom, trade unions and sister organisations, as extended wings of powerful political parties, rampage for unlawful and undeserved favours in appointments and scholarships and disrupt the academic calendar.

The proposed bill is expected to address these issues head-on. But this is exactly where it has miserably failed conceptually and structurally. It has conceived an all-powerful Higher Education Commission as the main regulatory body headed, yet again, by the minister of education. The prime minister is retained as the chancellor of Tribhuvan University, which occupies almost 83 percent of space in the country’s higher education. The bill apparently has been the victim of over-manipulative bureaucracy, wherein a bureaucrat has been made eligible to substitute a professor in critical leadership roles. The regulatory maze is created to make the academic leaders unequivocally subservient to the bureaucracy. This is the real death knell to academic independence and thus has invited resistance.

The objectives

The overarching objective of higher education policy should undoubtedly be to provide skilled human resources for every sector of the economy. And it must be able to create equitable opportunity for every citizen willing to be skilled. Therefore, the education policy must be aligned with the country’s present and future demand for the required skills and the number of skilled hands. This, in turn, also decides the number, types and size of the necessary higher education institutions, along with their geographical and demographic distribution. Unfortunately, Nepal has yet to formulate its development master plan with realistic projections of, among others, human resource needs for, say, the next 10 or 20 years. This is why education policy-making has become a paradise for vested interest groups and an exercise in shooting in the dark.

The organisational, regulatory and governance structures of higher education can only be objectively designed if the demand-supply dynamics of the human skills are adequately mapped in each economic domain—national, provincial or local—jointly and singly. But now, as the number of degree-awarding universities and institutes reaches 30, no authority is sure whether this number is optimal, less, or more vis-à-vis national development needs.

For example, provincial governments are aggressively opening new universities without any study of their viability and sustainability. It is happening at a time when the availability of quality faculty and an adequate number of students to run the programmes is becoming increasingly more challenging with every passing day. Equally worrisome is the fact that despite an increased number of institutions, all of them primarily replicate traditional disciplines like humanities, basic sciences, and management. Due to the absence of courses that impart globally saleable and futuristic skills, such as in digital technology, artificial intelligence and big data, genealogy, nuclear or cosmic science, the number of outbound students from Nepal has only grown over the years. The new bill clearly fails to understand and address these urgent issues.

Finally, the biggest travesty of the proposed bill is that no authority is willing to take ownership of it. Nobody knows who actually inserted these predatory provisions to give the upper hand to bureaucrats over academics in every possible aspect of running these higher education institutions. Despite public commitments from the political leaders, as high as the incumbent prime minister, to keep entire higher education from direct political interference, those provisions and structures found no space in the proposed bill supposed to govern the sector for a long time to come. The state authorities, mainly the line ministry, must therefore act constructively to not let this bill become another costly fiasco towards reforming the country’s higher education. Time is running out fast.