Students are struggling to complete their degrees, while professors flee the country in droves. BuzzFeed News' Karla Zabludovsky reports from Caracas on the brain drain that is threatening to bring Venezuela to its knees.

CARACAS, Venezuela — An eerie emptiness fills the hallways of Central Venezuela University's School of Chemistry building. Bottles of solvents gather dust inside the locked-up classrooms. Buckets sit underneath rusty pipes, wooden stools lie on top of the work stations, and the safety shower, used in the case of chemical emergencies, doesn't work properly. The campus, with its moldy ceilings and suffocating silence, has the feel of a 1970s horror movie set. Professors say the School of Chemistry, at Venezuela's top-rated university, won't open this semester because the administration lacks both the permits and the money to buy chemicals. There are more than 400 students waiting to complete lab courses who are, instead, filling their time with lectures and electives; many of them will not graduate in time. "We are trying to survive," said Mary Lorena Araujo, director of the School of Chemistry. Araujo makes around $50 a month at the black market rate. Many professors at the school, known as UCV, make less than $30, well below the minimum wage and not enough to buy the basic food basket, a government-established set of goods deemed necessary for a healthy life.

"What most students want is to graduate and leave Venezuela."

The problem replicates itself throughout the university. At the dentistry school, students have to pay for their own tools, sometimes working at the weekends to afford basic items like gauze and gloves. Professors, sympathetic to the challenges of finding the various pieces of dental equipment students need to work with, like full sets of teeth to make removable dentures, have lowered the number of requirements to pass classes. In many instances essential hands-on practice has been replaced by training videos, while class sizes have grown to accommodate students whose professors have abandoned them, often to seek opportunities abroad. "What most students want is to graduate and leave Venezuela," Yolanda Osorio, dean of the School of Odontology, said. She called those staying behind, including herself, "masochists." Osorio said she spends her days either calling alumni to ask for donations or signing, on average, 50 daily certificates for students who want to finish their studies abroad. More than 1,120 professors have left the UCV since 2009 (there are currently around 4,000 active instructors there). And the problem isn't just the mass exodus, said Gregorio Afonso, secretary of the university's association of professors, but a diminishing emphasis on original research, with the majority of incoming professors working exclusively, and often part-time, in classrooms. "There is no possibility of development without the development of science and technology," said Afonso.

Meridith Kohut for BuzzFeed News The School of Chemistry's storage room lies nearly empty, and the few bottles there expired years ago.

The UCV is a microcosm of what is happening across Venezuela: Salaries are generally insufficient to buy all the basic items families need, many of which are frequently unavailable anyway, as shortages batter the country. Skyrocketing inflation adds to the problem. Finding essential items has become an arduous journey often entailing queueing for hours, heavy markups and a deep-dive into the growing black market for everything from toilet paper to surgical tools. In a country where 5% of the population already lives abroad, including some of the most highly educated minds, many of those left behind are increasingly becoming fed up with the challenges of everyday life and looking for a way out of Venezuela. Ebelyn Rodríguez, 24, sat inside a shopping cart on a recent Saturday afternoon, near the end of a line that wrapped around a giant supermarket parking lot. She and her 19-year-old brother, Franklin, had already stood in a four-hour queue to buy chicken and appeared resigned to waiting again as red-shirted supermarket security men stood by with stern looks.

They had devised a plan for when they got inside: Franklin would go directly to the checkout line while Ebelyn waited for two packets of meat and then collected two kilograms of sugar and two liters of milk (the amount allotted to each person at this supermarket). But as she held her spot in the meat line, someone yelled that coffee had arrived and dozens of people whirled by in what threatened to become a stampede. "I'm not going in there," Ebelyn said — she was afraid of getting hurt and preferred to go home without coffee. In any case, the arrival of a shipment proved to be a rumor, as confirmed by an employee who stood below a large sign reading, "A Bolivarian revolution achievement." Shortages have been plaguing the country since 2013, as production costs have surpassed government-controlled prices while dollars, needed to import raw materials, have become more difficult to access. The government recently established a system in which people can only buy essential products like rice, sugar, butter, and coffee on selected days of the week, depending on the last number of their official identification cards. The same applies for medicine and even for getting appointments at some public offices. President Nicolás Maduro has said the shortages are the result of an economic war waged by the country's right-wing opposition, orchestrated by and from the U.S. embassy in Caracas. As a result, many people now spend large chunks of their free time waiting to buy food. "It's sad that the university and the country invested so much in us and now we are busy trying to find milk," said María Rodríguez, chief of the chemistry department at the UCV's Faculty of Science.

"Don Quixote is nothing compared to this."

As lines have become an inescapable fact of life in Venezuela, business for bachaqueros, the name given to people who resell items at three or four times the regular price, has boomed. The government recently installed fingerprint scanners in a number of supermarkets to try and curb its growth. But at a market in Petare, one of largest slums in Caracas, women sat behind stands illegally selling many government-regulated items, including diapers, toothpaste, shampoo, and razors carefully arranged beneath black plastic sheets.

Meridith Kohut for BuzzFeed News A student waits to certify her documents at Venezuela's Central University.