Social Climate
Will education be our future?
By Mahar Mangahas
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 02:32:00 01/19/2008
MANILA, Philippines -- Last Wednesday, Sen. Edgardo J. Angara spoke on “Education is our future” at the Jaime V. Ongpin annual memorial lecture at the Ateneo de Manila University, Rockwell campus. I was a discussant of the lecture.
I said that I agree with almost everything Senator Angara said -- the global context, the general analysis, and certainly with the theme that education should be our future. (The only part I disagree with is on tax breaks for business. Business only needs them when projects do not promise a very high rate of return. When social returns are not well captured by business, projects are better done by non-business institutions.)
I said that education should already have been our present, if the call for a quantum leap in investments in science, technology, and innovation had already been heeded by the government two decades ago, when made by former University of the Philippines president Emanuel “Noel” Soriano, and others.
My question, “Will education be our future?” is really asking when will the government accept the responsibility, pay the cost, and follow the principles of global competition in undertaking the needed investment in education. In all countries, it is the public sector -- and not the private non-profit sector or the business sector -- that is responsible for the major part of elementary and high school education, graduate-school training, and research, in science. (Collegiate training is an area where private education can be dominant.)
Accept the cost. The first issue, the cost, is very well worth paying. Senator Angara’s norm of 1.0 percent of the gross national product (GNP) for research and development is the same as the one that Noel Soriano recommended long ago. On an annual GNP of P6.6 trillion (2006), 1.0 percent is P66 billion. But the Philippines is currently investing only one-tenth of 1.0 percent, i.e., P6 billion. Thus the immediate annual shortfall is P60 billion ($1.5 billion). When will the government commit to filling this financial gap? It isn’t too large. It isn’t enough to catch up with Singapore and Japan, which are investing 2+ percent and 3+ percent, respectively. It only serves for the Philippines not to fall further behind in the global race.
There is no investment without sacrifice. Increasing public investment requires raising the savings rate, and the tax rate, on the present generation and -- to the extent that investment is based on borrowings -- on future ones. Alternatively, funds for more R&D can be raised by reallocations away from other investments. For example, the P60 billion could be cut from annual national government spending on public works projects with a lower rate of return than the return on R & D. Perhaps the local governments should pay for those public works instead. And if no one can pay for them, then let us just do without them.
Pay people competitive rates. My second point is on government employment policy toward people in science. Education is a human-resource-intensive activity. Most of the people engaged in it are, and should be, government employees, not private employees. The fundamental way of mobilizing human beings is by offering attractive compensation for their work. When will the government accept the principle of paying globally competitive salaries for its own workers in science?
Such workers should be freed from the Salary Standardization Law. Their employers, such as the University of the Philippines (UP), should have authority to set their own internal salary scales. For that matter, the UP management should be free to set a salary scale for each field of specialization!
A serious push towards R&D entails mobilizing very many, very qualified, people very fast. We should think global, and recruit not only Filipinos but also all other nationalities, as do Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and, of course, the United States. Let us look for talented scientists from Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America who want to emigrate but are denied visas by Western countries for political reasons. Let us prioritize young and unmarried scientists, many of whom, through chemistry and biology, will naturally find Filipino partners. Let us give them family visas in order to encourage them to settle down here.
Involve private institutions. My third point is that the government should support research in private institutions also. Private universities cannot be expected to sustain research solely on the basis of tuition fees. Under market rules, tuition revenue will cover the costs of teaching time only, and not the costs of research time also.
Not more than half of a research professor’s time should be for teaching. The research time, particularly for basic research, should be funded by the government and philanthropic sectors. For instance, the National Science Foundation, the US government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all non-medical fields of science and engineering, funds both public and private research on the basis of competitive proposals -- an excellent case being its 1994 grant that led to the development of the search engine Google at Stanford University, which is private.
The whole world is competing for scientists. Education will be our future when the government invests at least P60 billion per year in it, pays market rates to people in science, and makes use of the entire research community. When will that be?
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Contact Social Weather Stations: www.sws.org.ph or mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.
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