Sluggish progress in higher education identified

LOW STATE SPENDING in higher education may be blamed for the deterioration and underperformance of state universities and colleges (SUCs), a state-run think tank said, even as it lauded government for pushing reforms in basic education such as the K+12 program.

In a statement released yesterday, the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) said progress in the education sector has been “distressingly sluggish and inadequate” in recent years, with many higher education institutions failing to meet international and local quality standards.

“Low expenditure in higher education (HE) is considered to be a major factor to its deterioration and underperformance,” the statement said, citing a recent study by PIDS visiting research fellow Vicente Paqueo and senior research fellows Aniceto Orbeta, Jr. and Jose Ramon Albert.

It added that in 2007, the government spent less than 10% of its per-capita income on higher education, lagging behind its neighbors such as Indonesia and Malaysia, which spent 20% and 50% of its per-capita income, respectively.

PIDS also noted that technical and vocational education and training, which offers an alternative means of acquiring skills for employment, has not fulfilled its role, even with the surge in enrollment in the past decade.

“[D]espite the high labor demand, only 34% of technical vocational institution graduates found employment and only 26% consider their training useful for their job,” the think tank said.

Dismal educational performance begins even in the primary level, the statement noted, adding that “education indicators have remained embarrassingly low.”

PIDS said that dropout and repetition rates remain high, with completion rate for primary education at 75%.

Students’ performance in the national achievement test has also been poor and functional literacy among 10- to 15-year-old children has only been recorded at 62%, the statement added.

“If such trends continue, [PIDS] fears that the county could fail to honor its Millennium Development Goals commitment of achieving universal primary education by 2015,” the think tank said.

To address these issues, PIDS urged the government to:

• improve funding, implement cost sharing and establish a system for student loans;

• identify priority programs such as the achievement of universal primary education by 2015;

• improve equity through subsidies, discounts and greater allocation for indigenous peoples and disadvantaged areas;

• raise the educational system’s effectiveness by implementing accountability and incentives mechanism; and

• give higher priority to the “public good function” of the higher education sector by increasing the funding and strengthening of incentives for selected SUCs.

However, PIDS lauded efforts at reforming the basic education system, specifically the increased budget for the Education department. The government has also launched the mother tongue-based multilingual education policy and the K+12 reform program, aimed at improving educational competitiveness, the statement said.

There have also been reforms to improve tertiary education, the statement said, such as the rationalization of SUCs. The Technical Education and Skills Development Authority, meanwhile, is ramping up partnerships with the private sector to address the jobs-skills mismatch.

“Despite these efforts, though, concerns still remain, especially on the rush implementation of the K+12 program which, according to the researchers, may have unintended effects on social equity if publicly funded,” PIDS said, noting that many poor families do not reach this level of educational attainment. — Kim Arveen M. Patria, Businessworld