Exploring how gaps in education and opportunity are driving Nepal’s youth overseas
Over 100,000 Nepalis apply to study abroad every year, and that’s only based on the No Objection Certificate (NOC) numbers from the Ministry of Education. This doesn’t even include the thousands of students who go to India without needing an NOC. Around 5,000 Nepali students head to India annually for higher education alone. The number is so huge that leaving has become the norm. In Nepal today, we’ve normalised bidesh word so deeply that the real question isn’t “where you’ll study”, rather it’s “why you are not going abroad.”
Why is this happening?
One of the most prominent reason is the quality and recognition of education. Today, everyone is pushed to be competitive and to be the best, but Nepal doesn’t provide globally recognised degrees, let alone consistent quality. The same outdated syllabus is taught across the country year after year. While foreign education systems offer a broad range of courses and specializations, Nepal provides students with a limited selection to choose from with this youths often feel compelled to leave, not because they want to run away, but because staying feels like falling behind.
Even the basic academic system seems to be unreliable. Tribhuvan University has a long history of losing answer sheets, postponing exams randomly, leaking question papers, and delaying results for months. Every year, we hear the stories of how someone’s marksheet has gone missing, an entire class has to retake an exam, or results are published so late. This causes students to miss application deadlines for jobs and many other applications.
In 2024, hundreds of students from Population Studies and Education discovered that their answer sheets had been misplaced. They were given only a few days’ notice to retake the exam. In the same year alone, one incident affected 183 students, and another affected 210, all forced to retake their exams. Similar cases have happened for years. When results go missing, TU simply cancels them and reschedules exams.
Instead of accountability, the system shrugs and schedules another exam. Even worse, according to official data, Tribhuvan University granted study leave to over 400 teachers and staff for postgraduate and PhD programs. These leaves were meant to strengthen the university by bringing back skilled, knowledgeable faculty. Instead, more than half misused the opportunity. Around 200 of them went abroad and never returned to TU. 213 members failed to submit their completion certificates, and 187 simply disappeared from the system altogether. Many continued to live abroad with their families, take up teaching jobs in foreign universities, or remained missing for years.
These incidents may look small on the surface, but together they feed a deep-rooted academic decline in Nepal’s education system. Every lost marksheet and every careless error or delayed results takes away a piece of a student’s chance to lead a well-educated, dignified life. Slowly, it creates a culture where leaving the country becomes normal and almost expected. It reinforces the belief that going abroad is the only path to success, while staying in Nepal feels strange and somehow risky. And this mindset has grown into an epidemic where our young minds, the very pillars and future of the nation, no longer remain here.
Potential consequences
This is no longer just a trend; it has become a full-blown movement. Between FY 2018/19 and mid-2024/25, over 543,833 Nepali students obtained NOC to study abroad, with approximately Rs 493.09 billion spent on foreign education in the same period (MoEST, NRB). As quality education and economic stability remain uncertain at home, Nepal’s youth unemployment rate, estimated at 22.7% in FY23, makes migration a rational choice rather than an emotional one (World Bank). If this continues, Nepal will face severe brain drain, losing the very human capital required for innovation, productivity, and governance. The consequences are already visible: villages emptied of youth, universities struggling, and ambitious students looking abroad as the only path to success.
While remittance contributes nearly 23% of GDP, it masks the erosion of domestic talent as skilled individuals fuel growth in other economies instead of contributing to Nepal’s (World Bank 2012–2024). If even half of outbound students remained, tens of thousands of graduates could fill critical gaps in healthcare, engineering, education, and public services. South Asian studies estimate that prolonged academic brain drain is estimated to reduce national GDP potential by 2–3% annually due to declining workforce productivity and limited innovation. This leads to fewer taxpayers, weaker entrepreneurship, and a development slowdown that risks trapping Nepal in long-term dependence on remittance income.
These migration decisions are driven not by selfishness but by lived experiences of parents struggle, years of load shedding, unstable jobs, working tirelessly to keep the household running and a persistent lack of institutional reliability. Families invest billions abroad because they no longer trust that Nepal can convert education into opportunity. The real crisis isn’t that Nepalis are leaving, it’s that we’ve failed to give them a reason to stay.