Are Universities in Nepal Concerned About the Employability of Their Graduates?

While Nepali universities continue their core mission of teaching, grading, and generating research output, a diverse group of stakeholders-including students, industries, governments, and international agencies-now hold specific expectations: they demand that universities formulate job market-relevant courses, achieve breakthroughs in scientific discovery and technological growth, drive industry-specific innovations, and ultimately create employment opportunities for students immediately after graduation.

Universities in Nepal can’t remain relevant to digitally native, globally attuned, and employability-focused Gen-Z students by simply clinging onto the same old overstated or unsubstantiated employability claims based on generic references, false comparisons and decontextualized arguments borrowed from developed economies and emerging markets.

Here, our universities need to realize that asymmetry of claims without a data-driven, and transparent approach grounded employment outcomes will only generate confusion, self-doubts, cognitive dissonance, and dropout tendencies among graduate and postgraduate students. 

Moreover, universities in Nepal, aside from occasional job fairs, career events, and workshops, have not effectively leveraged public relations, communication, and marketing activities to establish their reputation as institutions capable of producing competent and industry-ready human resources in both national and international markets. In addition to job placement cells, universities also need to use social media marketing activity to display how their internship initiations have resulted in proper career pathways for their graduates and to what extent business or entrepreneurship ventures started by students have been sustained in the Nepalese business environment. Besides, our universities have to keep up with appropriate business metrics, industry analytics, policy reforms, job requirements, specializations, changes in employment guidelines of public and private enterprises, and emerging job market trends that impact the employability of their new graduates.

Symbolic rather than systemic/strategic concern for employability

Indeed, universities in Nepal have undertaken curriculum reforms aimed at strengthening practical learning necessary for the employability of their graduates. They have started to revise their curriculum based on industry-driven, practice-oriented approaches such as mandatory industry internships with no concurrent coursework, practicums for developing soft skill competencies, project-based work, consulting assignments, and relevant interactive, experiential, and problem-solving components within their course programs. Despite these efforts, a significant gap remains in a purposeful integration of theory and practice as our universities continue to operate within outdated institutional structures, self-referential norms, insular evaluations, and a lingering academic elitism.

Similarly, the teaching and learning model prevalent within our universities still privileges abstract knowledge, content delivery, passing exams and achieving grades, and structural academic practices. Besides, universities in Nepal have not been adequately able to encourage their faculty members to become impact-driven scholars, business collaborators, problem solvers, innovators, and pracademics who can translate complex theories into actionable strategies for start-ups and entrepreneurs.

Here again, another longstanding problem with the university system in Nepal has been the disproportionate focus on employment achievements of exceptional outliers rather than the typical student. A handful of bright and highly motivated graduates do indeed launch start-ups, pass public service commission exams, and secure government job positions, or excel in foreign universities with their academic knowledge. But for the majority of students seeking stable employment and a feasible career path, they receive insufficient systemic support from the university. They rarely encounter learning environments that help them connect theory to practice or develop applied skills aligned with professional needs. Hence, the concern for graduate employability in Nepal has been more symbolic rather than systemic and strategic.

Lack of job market reputation

More importantly, universities in Nepal need to realize that the employability of graduates also depends on their job market reputation. Employers associate the quality of graduates with the professional credibility, industry engagement, and innovation capacity of the universities they have graduated from. Hence, without proper alignment with the requirements of the job market at both the national and international levels, it will be difficult for universities in Nepal to enroll sufficient students in both graduate and postgraduate studies. After all, graduate employability has become a central concern shaping institutional missions worldwide.

Moreover, to address these concerns, universities in Nepal must rethink their purpose and adopt an integrated education model that considers academic rigor and practical relevance as complementary rather than contradictory to each other. If universities in Nepal are genuinely concerned about the employability of their students, they must think beyond bureaucratic inertia and commit to evidence-based reforms that closely engage with employers. Likewise, they need to embed and sustain employability skills in every stage of the student learning journey. Decisively, apart from mere claims, false equivalences, and generic narratives, our universities need to illustrate data-driven graduate employability outcomes to convince Gen-Z students and their parents in Nepal about their reputation in the job market.