Where the four out of five graduates go

In any given year, Bhutan produces 10,000–12,000 new university graduates and the Royal Civil Service Commission hires 2,000–2,500 of them as new entrants. The prize is real — stable salary, fully indexed pension, family medical cover, concessional housing finance, generational social standing. The odds are about one in five.

The four who don’t make the cut don’t always concede on graduation day. They iterate on the exam for two or three years, working in coaching centres or temporary private-sector roles, sitting the exam again each May. The 2025 NSB study found that having aspired to government work multiplies a graduate’s unemployment odds by 21× over the cohort who didn’t aspire — measured against a base rate of low single-digit per cent for non-aspirants. The civil service is, in part, the country’s youth-unemployment-absorption mechanism precisely because so many young people structure their twenties around it.