On Higher Education in Bhutan

I have been busy preparing for classes, and all of the faculty have returned so the college is starting to feel like a college. The first year students have arrived, also, and have been registering for classes and moving into their dormitories. That has kept the staff busy as well.

As I am preparing to teach, I thought I would take a moment and explain what higher education is like in Bhutan as I have come to understand it personally. There are some distinct and interesting differences between Bhutan and the United States, as one would come to expect.

In Bhutan, secondary school ends at Grade 10 and high schoolers take an exam in order to enter Grades  11-12. However, if they don't pass the entrance exam into upper-secondary they can go to a private upper-secondary school. About 40% of Bhutanese upper-seconday students go to private schools. At the end of the upper-secondary grades (Grade 12), there is an entrance exam into higher education.

Students that perform well on the college entrance exam are admitted to the Royal University of Bhutan system and their entire higher education – including room & board – is free of charge. Some very high performers of the college entrance exam are granted scholarships to attend colleges and universities abroad – mostly in India, but also some in Australia, Europe, and North America. The King grants these scholarships personally. The Royal University of Bhutan (RUB) is a system of 10 colleges. There is not actually a physical place called 'RUB.' This system is only a few years old. Previously, the colleges operated more or less independently. The first college in Bhutan – Sherubtse College in Eastern Bhutan – was only founded in the late 1980s. Other colleges include the National Institute of Traditional Medicine, Paro College of Education, and Gaeddu College of Business Studies to name a few.

There is a severe space-crunch in RUB, however, and many students who pass their college entrance exam do not get a spot in RUB colleges. There are only around 2,000 seats available at RUB for each in-coming class, even though 6,000 students have passed the college entrance exam. Because of this, about 2,000 students take their studies outside of Bhutan (again, almost entirely in India). Those that are left (around 2,000) either do not go into higher education or now have the option of attending Royal Thimphu College (RTC) – where I work!

RTC is the first and only private college in Bhutan, established primarily because of the higher education space issue mentioned above. It took its first class in 2009 (very recently!) and the first graduating class graduated last month. By examining that last sentence, you will deduce that higher education in Bhutan is three years long. The director of RTC, Dasho Tenzin Yonten (btw, 'Dasho' is a title of respect given to high members of Bhutanese society), gave these reasons for establishing RTC:

• To provide choice (aka meeting the demand that RUB cannot meet)
• To provide an alternative to the textbook/exam system in higher education
• To develop critical thinkers
• To make a difference in the education sector of Bhutan
• To contribute to society

This year, there are about 900 students enrolled at RTC. Because RUB takes the highest students, and many other academically-motivated students study abroad, RTC has a very specific student profile. Mainly, RTC's students are those that didn't have the marks to make it into RUB, but have the family money available to pay for private tuition. The student services and administrative staff at RTC noted that in many of their application essays, the students referred to themselves as 'failures.' In other words, these are not the most motivated college students in Bhutan. The guiding principles of RTC seek to make it a progressive leader in higher education in Bhutan. It is restricted by its novelty and the characteristics of the student body. However, RTC is now taking on students that have had high enough marks on the college entrance exam to be on full scholarship, and the King has pledged that a few select top students at RTC will be granted scholarships for graduate work abroad.

Another restrictive element to RTC is that it must remain an 'affiliated college' to the RUB system, and thus must fit under their rules and regulations. Unlike the United States, where colleges and universities operate independently, Bhutanese higher education is very restrictive. All colleges must adhere to the Wheel of Academic Law that is formed by RUB officials. What this is entails is a fully-prescribed academic sequence that no college is allowed to alter. This is a source of frustration for the administration here at RTC that would like to align their academic philosophies more with progressive Western higher education systems. For example, RTC must make students take a final examination in each module (class). But, RTC has stretched the rules a bit by de-emphasizing the final and putting more weight on continuous assessments (exams, papers, quizzes, projects, presentations, etc.). This is common in Western higher education. For a long time, RUB prescribed only the final exam as a measure of passing or failing a module. If a students failed any module, they were not given the option of repeating the course and, thus, were dropped from their program and the college. There was no incentive for RUB to keep around students if they were subsidizing their education and there were thousands of students clamoring to get admitted. RTC was the first college to allow its students to repeat modules and to give their students multiple opportunities to pass exams. RUB has since revised some of its policies around this as RTC has challenged them. 

Conformity to the RUB system also personally impacts my teaching as I have a syllabus that is dictated by the RUB – everything from the learning objectives, to the assignment break-downs, to the readings themselves. However, RTC allows me to make subtle (or not-so-subtle) changes to RUB's curriculum. Thus, in my own module planning, I have a hybrid of RUB-prescribed readings and my own selection. RTC also wants me to put more emphasis on continuous assessments rather than the final exam, as dictated by RUB. As you can probably imagine, there is a lot of push-pull between RTC and RUB and every change to the syllabus must be justified to the RUB academic examining committee. Whereas RUB's philosophy is much more rooted in 'information-reguritation' on exams and lecture-based teaching, RTC is trying to push the higher education system in Bhutan to accept more learner-centered teaching and classroom activities and exams based on Bloom's taxonomy of low-order to high-order learning (memory, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation). 

It's an interesting higher education system that is bureaucratically trying to manage its traditions while also progressing forward to meet the demands of the times. While I do not necessarily endorse private education as a solution, I am excited to be at RTC because of its role in challenging some of the status quo in the RUB system. The phenomenon of private colleges springing up in countries that subsidize their public higher education systems for top students is well-documented. However, in those countries it is almost too easy to start a higher education institution and there is a lot of corruption and deception. (Even in the United States, there is a growing problem of for-profit higher education institutions that don't deliver quality 'education' but take your money anyway.) In Bhutan, it is not easy to just start a college, and you must receive Royal permission to do so (His Majesty is the de-facto president of RUB). So for RTC to be in operation can be considered a major coup, and speaks to the persuasiveness and passion of our director. 

It will be interesting to see how higher education evolves in Bhutan, as the system is quite new (the United States has about a three-hundred year head start; modern Europe has about a thousand-year head start). One thing that has already changed in Bhutan is that the minimum requirement to enter the civil service – including a politician in the national government – is a bachelor's degree. (Imagine if we required every member of congress in the United States to have a college degree, while so many American politicians pride themselves on being 'folksy' and un-educated.) This new credentialism in Bhutan will no doubt raise the demand for higher education even further and how RUB responds will affect the entirety of the country.