In most countries education is a means to an end. In Nepal it has become the end itself. Families spend fortunes not because they expect a return in the form of a domestic job, but because they fear the alternative: downward mobility, social disgrace or, worse, permanent economic precarity. To the average Nepali household, a university degree is less a springboard into employment and more a hedge against the chaos of an uncertain state. The fallout is a curious paradox: an economy drowning in graduates yet starved of skills.
This is not madness. In Nepal where social security is fragile, government jobs are limited and informal work is the norm, education gives the illusion of control. It signals employability to foreign embassies and marriageability to future in-laws. More than a qualification, it is an asset class—albeit a volatile one.
The labour market, however, is not playing along. Some 3m young people are neither in employment, education, nor training. Business schools produce more graduates than there are businesses to hire them. Engineering degrees outpace infrastructure projects. Degrees have multiplied; demand for them has has not.
Employers, overwhelmed by a glut of indistinguishable CVs, respond by raising entry requirements. Even clerical positions now call for a master’s degree. This is classic credential inflation. Much like a currency devalued by overprinting, the BA is no longer worth what it once was. Institutions, often poorly regulated and profit-driven, respond by churning out even more degrees—many of them barely marketable. What emerges is a graduate underclass: overqualified, underemployed and increasingly resentful.
Yet the true market for Nepali education is not Nepal. It is the world. For many, the point of a degree is not domestic employment but overseas migration. Education, in this sense, is a visa-processing fee in academic drag. A bachelor’s in Australia or a diploma in Canada is less about what is learned and more about where it leads. Migration agents and education consultants line Kathmandu’s streets, giving families an expensive escape hatch.
Financing that dream is a national sport. Parents mortgage ancestral land, sell livestock or borrow at usurious rates to bankroll their children’s exit. The implicit bargain: the child will remit earnings back home, thereby validating the investment. But the risks are high. Some return empty-handed. Others stay, but fail to thrive. What began as an insurance policy often ends as a debt trap.
The consequences on the economy are perverse. Sectors like agriculture, tourism and manufacturing struggle to attract labour, not because workers are unavailable, but because everyone is chasing a degree—or a plane ticket. Technical and vocational training, though far more relevant, is stigmatised as a fallback for academic failures. The outcome is a labour mismatch: too many graduates for too few white-collar jobs, and too few skilled workers for the trades that sustain a developing economy.
This dysfunction is not unique to Nepal. India, too, produces engineers who end up as call-centre agents. In the Philippines nursing degrees are pursued as much for emigration potential as medical interest. Nigeria is home to a booming private university sector with little connection to domestic employment. Yet others provide instructive contrasts. Germany’s dual education model marries apprenticeships with formal learning. South Korea, once obsessed with test scores, is now reforming curricula to prioritise skills and well-being.
Nepal, for its part, has shown little institutional imagination. Public education is underfunded, career counselling is rare and labour-market forecasting is almost non-existent. Curriculum reforms are still stuck in 20th-century exam worship. Even as the private sector clamours for practical skills, universities continue to mass-produce generalists with little exposure to industry.
If education is to become something more than a speculative asset, the state must intervene. That means rethinking funding models, aligning university output with employer needs and—most crucially—dignifying vocational pathways. Migration policy, too, should pivot from credential-chasing to skills-based partnerships, so that remittances become the fruit of structured mobility rather than family desperation.
Ultimately, the fetishisation of degrees in Nepal is a rational response to irrational conditions. When institutions are weak, markets send murky signals and political futures feel uncertain, a certificate becomes the one thing a parent can believe in. But belief alone cannot build an economy.
Should I stay or should I go?
The country must ask itself a hard question: is it educating to keep its youth or educating to lose them? The answer, for now, is painfully clear. Education has become a ticket out, not a tool for transformation. Until that changes, Nepal will continue exporting its ambition—and importing disappointment. ■
