Yesterday the top-level academic, financial and administrative managers of the University of San Carlos met at its annual mid-year evaluation conference. USC president Fr. Dionisio M. Miranda, SVD minced no words in his opening statement to the 60 or so who were gathered saying, “The full impact of the educational reform now upon us will happen in 2018 and those who are not ready will be left behind and will disappear!”
The educational reform he referred to started with the entry of the Senior High School (SHS) program all over the country this academic year. Just three semesters from now, the first graduates of the program will be taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) to determine who can proceed to enter college and who will not.
Estimates are that 70 percent will no longer proceed especially with the SHS already equipping them with the necessary national certification for certain skills needed in the workforce. In Cebu alone, according to Fr. Miranda, some 50,000 graduates will be looking for jobs in 2018.
The face of tertiary education will as a result also radically change. Already the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) has identified nine courses to be taken by all college students, comprising a radically redefined General Education Curriculum (GEC), other than the major courses that they need to get a degree. Nine national teacher training programs are on-going all over the country right now for these nine courses, with USC handling the national training for the course, “The Contemporary World.”
Those who pass the training program, which is taught for about three weeks complete with examinations, will be given certificates of completion and will become trainers of future traineers of particular courses they too trained for. Those who do not will just be given certificates of participation and will not be allowed to train others when
they go back to their locales.
Even as the GEC trainings going on, USC met yesterday to evaluate the readiness of its graduate programs. Based on CHED data, Fr. Miranda explicitly outlined the current state and the targets set for faculty qualifications to the tertiary program, from the bachelor’s degree holders (currently 50% of total faculty population, set to be reduced to 32% by 2020); Master’s degrees (now at 50% to 48% by 2020) and doctorate degrees (now at 11% to 20% by 2020).
To reach the needed faculty population with corresponding degrees (especially the huge jump from just 11 percent with Ph.D.s to 20 percent by 2020), CHED has identified delivering higher education institutions (DHEIs), with USC as one of them for either Master’s or Doctoral or both programs offered by the different schools (formerly called colleges) that comprise USC.
Limited space in this column will not allow me to go into the details of how USC has been preparing for the coming storm through a multifaceted and multi-pronged approach.
Suffice to say that the picture of Philippine education will radically change and that, indeed as Fr. Miranda so bluntly warned everyone in that meeting yesterday, the situation is do or die.
For some departments, this will mean dissolving academic departments, merging some or giving way to research institutes (Fr. Miranda calls this “creative destruction”.) At the SHS level, textbooks produced by USC are now going to be used and even shared with other schools. A host of faculty members are also now going abroad or to other institutions in the Philippines to finish their doctorates.
The most immediately telling of the urgency to adapt to the coming change was that some deans and heads of academic units could not attend the mid-year conference because they were abroad, either bench-marking with other institutions, attending trainings, or sitting with other possible university partners.
If USC — given its long history of collaboration, international linkages, research and teaching is gearing up for the coming storm — I can only hope the rest of the 1,920-plus higher education institutions in the Philippines are too.
Otherwise, come 2020 we might see many of them, including state colleges and universities, falling by the wayside and destined for the dustbin of history.
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