Ten years ago Nepal tore up a centralised state and rebuilt itself as a federation –seven new provinces, each with real say over planning, budgets, service delivery. The whole point, as far as I understood it growing up, was that Kathmandu would stop being the only place worth going to build something.
I grew up in Biratnagar, which is not some remote corner of the country; it is a fairly well-connected city in the east. Even so, by the time I finished school there, everyone already assumed you had to go to Kathmandu for anything serious. So I did, for high school. By then, Tribhuvan University (TU) had been the only real name in Nepali higher education for about 40 years. When it actually came to a degree, I left the country entirely, undergrad in India, then graduate school in Germany. I suppose that makes me a small data point in the exact outmigration story this paper ultimately tells.
My colleagues and I started looking at whether a decade of federalism had changed anything. The first hurdle was the data itself. We pulled information from the University Grants Commission (UGC)'s annual reports covering 2013 to 2023, but every report seemed to come with its own formatting quirks. Tables were split across pages, layouts changed from year to year, and the same college often appeared under different names. Before we could analyse anything, we had to spend a lot of time cleaning and standardising the data.
Once the dataset was finally in shape, the results were hard to ignore. TU still accounted for more than three-quarters of all higher education enrollment in Nepal. Its share was 84 percent in 2013. Ten years later, after an earthquake, a pandemic, and the transition to federalism, it was still 78 percent. I remember recalculating those figures several times because they did not match what I expected to see.
Part of the reason is fairly mundane. Most new colleges opening over the past 30 years did not launch as independent universities. They opened as private affiliates of TU, plugging straight into its degree-granting authority rather than competing with it. The sector kept adding classrooms without ever really adding a second address.
I did my master's at Justus Liebig University, founded in 1607, and my PhD at the University of Hohenheim, founded in 1818. Both are centuries older than TU, and neither has ever needed the other's permission to grant a degree. Germany has dozens of universities like that, old and new, sitting side by side, none of them swallowing the rest. Nepal took a different path. I doubt anyone in the 1960s planned for it to look this way 60 years later. It just never got revisited.
Geography tells much the same story, and it is the part that bothers me most, since spreading opportunity out geographically was supposed to be the whole point of this reform. Bagmati Province holds roughly a fifth of the national population but somewhere between 44 and 46 percent of higher education enrolment – 12 universities, 564 campuses. Karnali, spread across far more land, has two universities and 58 campuses. A good share of Bagmati's number is not even Bagmati's own population; it's students who left Karnali, Madhes, or Sudurpaschim because the programme they wanted or the job market waiting for them does not exist back home. A decade in, Kathmandu is still pulling people towards it, not the other way around.
It is not only old habits doing this. One of the country's newest universities was chartered just last year, and its charter says it should be located outside the Kathmandu Valley. Right now, it's operating in Kathmandu anyway.
One result surprised me. Women now outnumber men in higher education nationwide. My first reaction was to take that as an unqualified success. Then I started breaking the data down by province and by field. Men still dominate science and technology in every province. In Sudurpaschim, meanwhile, there are more than two women for every man in general education programmes. I do not think those numbers tell a simple story about gender equality. They may be telling us something about migration instead. If many young men leave for technical training or work in Kathmandu or overseas, the gender balance in local colleges will change even if opportunities for women have not improved much. Before treating the Gender Parity Index as evidence that provincial higher education is becoming more equal, I would want to know how much of it reflects who stayed and who left.
Two smaller things are worth flagging. Enrolment growth over the decade has come almost entirely from general subjects like management, education, and the humanities, while the share of science and technology peaked in 2016 and has been declining since. And the share of students who finish secondary school and go on to enroll in a bachelor's programme remains low. It varies widely by province, suggesting the leak in this pipeline starts well before anyone even applies to university.
The numbers do not convince me that federalism has failed. They convince me that Nepal confused decentralisation with implementation. Giving provinces constitutional authority was the easy part. Giving them the funding, staff, and institutional capacity to exercise that authority has proved much harder. If Nepal wants a different outcome over the next decade, it has to address that gap. Provincial universities need sustained funding, not just legal recognition. Science and technology programmes have to be developed beyond the Kathmandu Valley through deliberate policy choices rather than expectation alone.
Just as importantly, higher education data should be collected and published in a consistent format so researchers do not have to reconstruct basic enrollment records from a decade of annual reports. Without those changes, I suspect the next study will tell much the same story, only with a different set of numbers.
Dr Pokharel is a researcher at the Centre for Environmental and Sustainable Agricultural Research (CESAR)