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BY HERBERT VEGO
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A SHORT item in yesterday’s Lapsus Calami commended Commission on Higher Education (CHED) chairperson Patricia Licuanan for encouraging high school graduates to take up technical-vocational education instead of college courses.
But the same item segued into the decision of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) to hire 24,000 Filipino nurses. Obviously, these recruits have not passed through senior high school, whose first batch is now in Grade 11. Since Nursing is a college degree, what has Licuanan got to do with “tech-voc”?
Her message is that if high school finishers could not afford to study in college, they could go to the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) and be as employable as the nurses.
This clarification has to be made because of previous rallies done in Manila by cause-oriented groups – namely the National Union of Students in the Philippines (NUSP) and Salinlahi Alliance for Children’s Concern (SACC) – depicting CHED and Licuanan as “the stumbling blocks to achieving quality, free tertiary education.”
They also lamented that the K to 12 program of the Department of Education adding two more years to secondary education also holds back the poor youth from pursuing college.
In a sense, they are correct on the premise that the cost of college education, whether in public or private schools, has become so exorbitant that it is beyond the reach of the poor. Indeed, the CHED has haphazardly allowed yearly tuition fee increases prejudicial to them.
Is that why, early in December 2016, President Duterte asked Licuanan to give up her CHED post and to stop attending Cabinet meetings in Malacañang? No no no. It’s because she is an appointee of the previous President, Benigno Aquino III.
Although she defied the first part of the order, she has not been attending Cabinet meetings since them. Her legal defense is that her term of office will not expire until July 2018. No wonder she’s still there.
The members of NUSP did not like the alleged anti-poor statement that Licuanan had said in a media interview: “We don’t think that every student really should go to college. That option of going into technical-vocational and middle-level jobs is attractive, but in our culture, we have that notion that everyone should get a college diploma. I don’t think that’s necessary.”
Methinks it’s not anti-poor. It’s not only the poor who have aptitude for technical-vocational courses. There are scions of the rich who study Cookery and end up “equal” with the poor when they end up as chefs in five-star hotels here or abroad.
The popularity of tech-voc is understandable in the light of statistics obtained from the Department of Education: Out of 100 Filipino children who enroll in Grade 1, only 66 make it to Grade 6 and only 21 eventually finish college education. Needless to say, the majority who fail to finish college have the disadvantage of “unemployability.”
Fortunately, change has come. No less than TESDA director general Guiling Mamondiong has announced that fourth-year finishers may now enroll at TESDA.
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Kudos to Josie Moralidad, the only Ilongga broadcaster based in Washington, DC. We heard her again yesterday on the Targetanay sa Udto program of Ronnel Sorbito on DyRI-RMN Radio. She expressed confidence that despite the massive “women’s rally” against President Donald Trump, the latter would hold on because of his “American First” policy. More jobs, she believes, would be opened in the United States because Trump would ban, whenever possible, the manufacture of American brands in Mexico and China./PN
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