Tertiary Education, Students’ Experiences, and Future Imaginations in Bhutan

Abstract

As an institution, Royal Thimphu College, akin to other university colleges in the country, is situated at the vanguard of the Bhutanese society that is to come; not just through imparting young adults with specialised knowledge and skills, with patterns of socialisation, and with canons of cultural representation and style, but equally because it constitutes a decisive stage in life-long individual and collective processes of fruition. It is in this stage, when young adults hover around intellectual, emotional and professional maturity, and usually just prior to the societal roles and responsibilities of family and employment, that young adults are engaged in often highly personalised and equally highly socially conditioned quests of self-discovery and self-making. It is when embodied experiences mould their general outlooks, and when they speculate, reflect and worry about the road they are traveling and about the paths and possibilities that fork off in the college afterlife. This essay seeks to capture precisely this moment; a phase that is fleeting, life-altering, uncertain, and often stressful. It does so through the analytics of ‘experiences’, ‘aspirations’, and ‘anxieties.’