Failing grade

BATCH 2011 does not only have to confront a shrinking job market and a ballooning unemployment problem. Its members must also contend with state licensure exams whose results may belie that college graduates have had any solid education at all, which could further dim their job prospects. Data compiled by the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) from the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) showed that only slightly over one-third, or 36.09 percent, of 415,190 college graduates who took board exams in 2009 passed. The figure represents a decline from 2008, when 38.67 percent of 390,378 examinees passed, across 44 disciplines in education, medicine, engineering and other science and technology courses.

The decrease in licensure passers is in stark contrast to the increasing number of examinees, from more than 232,500 in 2004 to almost twice the number in 2009, with 415,190 examinees. The falling passing rate means that over 60 percent of college graduates taking professional exams fail. Courses with the lowest passing rates are engineering and allied disciplines, such as aeronautics, electronics and communications and marine engineering. Meanwhile, board examinees for nursing, who numbered 172,344 in 2009, had only a 40.7 percent passing rate, lower than the 43.9 percent in 2008.

The fact that some IT schools that have branched out to include nursing among its course offerings in order to cash in on the nursing craze have been notoriously delivering poor results in the electronics engineering exams should indicate that IT schools are being rewarded profitably despite posting generally low passing percentages in their regular programs. So what have the PRC, CHEd and the nursing and engineering boards of examiners been doing?

The CHEd has been notorious for its tendency to over-regulate course offerings and disciplines of private education at large, which does not receive anything from government, without however doing anything to stop poor-performing private nursing and engineering schools. It has also failed to check the proliferation of state and local colleges and universities, much less monitor the quality of education they offer. Its propensity to enter into terrain it should not be involved in was evident in the last administration, when it even organized an intercollegiate sportsfest at taxpayers’ expense!

The PRC meanwhile still has to recover from its disastrous handling of the 2006 scandal, in which review centers allegedly leaked the test in cahoots with the examiners themselves. Rather than order a new exam, the PRC merely recomputed the results. Critics of the PTC move have been proven correct. Because of PRC’s inept handling, the Philippines’ reputation as a provider of world-class nurses has been tarnished. There has been a steady decline in nursing job placements abroad since then.

The new CHEd, which is now headed by Chair Patricia Licuanan, has said it recognizes the faltering quality of higher education and so it is drawing up measures to strictly enforce standards in both private and public colleges and universities. Licuanan said the CHEd will implement a rationalization plan to streamline the education system that is currently crowded with more than 2,000 institutions.

To be sure, the troubles experienced by tertiary education are a carry-over from basic education. Sen. Edgardo Angara, for instance, has said that a tremendous amount of money has been given the DepEd by international donors and business concerns, but it has nothing to show for it.

But tertiary education needs reforming itself.  Let us remember the British Council study in 2005 that cited the unusually high number of tertiary schools in the Philippines: 1,380 universities and colleges. (The number may have ballooned to 2,000 more or less. So what has the CHEd been doing? Obviously the situation has gotten worse.) And more are getting into the act because cities and provinces are putting up their own colleges and universities with hardly any clearance from and accreditation by the CHEd. Meanwhile, the CHEd has been slow in clamping down on substandard schools, especially private nursing schools owned by politically influential businessmen. It hasn’t cracked the whip on schools whose products have consistently underperformed in licensure exams, and it hasn’t really monitored the quality of historically low-performing state and local universities and colleges.