Chapter 11 - Nepal’s Educated Nonelite: Reevaluating State-Provided Higher Education

Abstract

There has been much debate about the role of state-provided higher education in Nepal in recent years. The country’s first university was established in 1959 based on the idea that higher education constitutes an enabling factor both in the lives of individuals and in the development of society at large. State-provided higher education, however, seems to have failed on several counts, including governance, quality, and equity. In this chapter, I engage with this ongoing debate about the value of public higher education from two different angles: first, I outline which efforts have been made to reform the higher education sector since the early 1990s and show that Nepal’s policymakers have given relatively low priority to the problem of unequal access to higher education. Second, I take a more student-centered approach and present the cases of three students, whom I met in 2011/2012 while conducting research on a public university campus in Kathmandu. I argue that more attention needs to be paid to students’ perspectives, because the ideas and experiences of these young people raise a number of critical points and help to reevaluate the role of public higher education in Nepal.