It is difficult being an educator at a time when you continue to face complaints from employers that graduates are not job-ready. At the recently held panel discussion and workshop, this issue was once again raised. This is something I usually hear in conversations with employers as well as academics within and even outside my institution. I notice that it is rarely addressed as purely a matter of curriculum deficiency. It has increasingly become more of a human resource issue. Universities and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are short of qualified faculty who consistently impart the right content.

According to the University Grants Commission’s EMIS figures for 2023/24, 12,082 full-time teachers work in the constituent campuses. However, the community and private affiliated campuses, which enrol approximately 62 percent of the total 633,053 students enrolled in higher education institutions in Nepal, are not required to submit any full-time faculty register data. As a result, the actual picture of full-time faculty members cannot be easily estimated and is likely to be a fraction of what enrolment numbers would demand.

The disparity becomes distinct when one juxtaposes the trend lines of two different measures. From 2016/17 to 2023/24, overall higher education enrollment in Nepal increased by around 71 percent, growing from 371,000 to 633,000 students. In the same period, the teaching staff across the constituent campuses increased by less than 30 percent, from 9,299 to 12,082 faculty members. Students are now joining the educational system almost twice as fast as their instructors join to educate them.

The disparities between the universities are just as illustrative. Tribhuvan University, which accounts for more than 75 percent of the country’s higher education student body, reports a student-teacher ratio of around 21:1 within its constituent campuses. The ratio for Kathmandu University is about 25:1, for Far-Western University 47:1, and for Nepal Open University, whose distance learning model explains the huge numbers, the ratio is a rather striking 102:1. This suggests that teaching capacity is unevenly distributed by institution as well as by discipline.

The amount of public funding has also increased from Rs9.3 billion in 2017/18 to Rs17.5 billion in 2023/24, although most of this additional funding has been made in infrastructure and block grants rather than the recruitment of full-time faculty members, especially outside HEIs in Kathmandu.

When placed against international benchmarks, Nepal’s position appears to be dismal. The generally quoted planning range of the student-to-faculty ratio is 10:1 to 20:1 internationally. In the case of the United States, the average student-to-faculty ratio at degree-granting institutions was approximately 13:1 in the fall of 2022, 14:1 in public four-year colleges and 10:1 in private non-profit four-year colleges. The standards for AICTE of India for technical education regard the faculty-to-student ratio as 10:1 and 15:1 to be the minimum acceptable ratio for relevant technical courses due to the nature of laboratory-based courses.

According to UNESCO and the World Bank’s tertiary-level indicators, however, international comparisons of teacher-student ratio are clouded by varying definitions of ‘teacher’ and differential treatment of part-time teachers. Nevertheless, the Nepali practice of overreliance on visiting and part-time instructors, especially in private HEIs and those outside Kathmandu, indicates that the ratio is likely to worsen than at constituent campuses.

Nor does the shortage hit all disciplines in equal measure. At my own institution, we have earlier been compelled to employ foreign nationals to teach courses on industrial economics and big data analysis purely due to a lack of local expertise. In other instances, there was a failure to deliver a course on marketing analytics owing to a lack of instructors. Students are increasingly favouring courses related to analytics and simulations, but the number of skilled instructors has failed to match their need. Some of this deficiency is reduced by faculty borrowing between departments and even institutions—again, an unsustainable practice. Such problems are even more pronounced outside the capital city, as most trained faculty have little incentive to relocate.

There is no consolidated figure that Nepal publishes for its expenditure on faculty development activities; however, even a liberal estimate that takes into account all funding for research, fellowships, conferences and course development is still a bare minimum compared to the minuscule higher education budget. There are very few opportunities for inter-university cooperation, sabbatical leaves and faculty exchanges across institutions. Online trainings and certifications, which are comparatively inexpensive and effective means of updating faculty members and keeping them abreast of international best practices, are hardly taken into consideration.

A standardised entry-level qualifying examination for faculty, as such, is unlikely to solve this issue. Given the role of AI in changing the skill set, a large number of skills tested in such an exam may quickly become obsolete in a few years. What Nepal needs to do is develop a National Higher Education Framework that treats faculty recruitment, retention, and development as policy priorities, not simply a management issue. This means using different benchmarks for staffing for different disciplines, and giving the disciplines with laboratory work and new emerging technical skills realistic numbers as opposed to one single standard; making community and private affiliated colleges, where most of the student body is enrolled, report their full-time faculty numbers; creating incentives for faculty to teach outside Kathmandu Valley and in new emerging technical areas; and considering faculty development funds as protected funds in relation to enrollment growth, not simply a residual claim on the leftover budget.

As long as the capacity of educators does not increase along with the enrollment rate of students, Nepali universities will continue to churn out graduates who find themselves trailing others in their profession by a slight margin, not because of any lack of drive, but because there is a shortage of people who can train them in the way the market requires. The best academic brains will continue to be poached by other HEIs and industry as well, not because the environment does not facilitate teaching, but because pay and opportunity elsewhere still appear more lucrative than teaching.