In a clear indication of students losing faith in the state-owned colleges, the enrolment in the Tribhuvan University constituent campuses has dropped to its lowest in eight years even as the student share of their private counterparts almost doubled during the same period.

A report submitted in the TU senate meeting two weeks ago suggests just 148,141 students got admission to the TU constituent colleges in the last fiscal year--the lowest since fiscal year 2005/06 when the enrolment was 132,777. The report also shows a sharp drop in the share of the students for the government-funded colleges. The share of TU constituent colleges has dropped 36.55 percent from 61.3 percent over the period while that of the private colleges has increased from 38.9 percent in 2005/06 to 63.45 percent or 256,200 in last year.

Around 186,880 students were enrolled in the constituent colleges in 2009/10 but their numbers dipped to 159,395 the following year, the report says. Though 273,349 students got admission to the constituent colleges in 2012/13, a large chunk of them turned out to be fake students as various unions admitted thousands of students in a bid to win the Free Student Union election.

The private colleges, however, admitted 46,800 more students in the fiscal year 2012/13 than the previous year while taking in 256,200 in the last fiscal year. Around 90 percent of the total university level students study in some 1,100 TU colleges.

The downward trend in admission at the TU constituent colleges--which were once considered popular among the middle and lower-middle class families--suggest they are fast losing their appeal. Education experts attribute the worrying phenomena to over politicisation of academic environment, TU’s failure to maintain a strict academic calendar, degrading quality of education and lack of dedicated teachers.

But TU officials maintain that as the students from both the private and constituent colleges are the product of the same university, they should not be looked differently. Chandra Mani Poudel, registrar at the TU, pointed to the decentralisation of the colleges with a growing number of affiliated colleges as the main reason for the low enrolment. “The overall students have not decreased. So it should not be taken as the failure of TU,” Poudel argued.

With the increasing attraction towards the affiliated colleges their numbers have increased to 1,088 from 832 since 2007/08 however, the constituent colleges have remained static at 60.

source: Binod Ghimire, The Kathmandu post,30 sept 2014