CHEd faces Edcom review with 1990s goals barely met
The Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) has been struggling to fulfill its original mandate of keeping the country’s higher education in tune with the changing demands of the labor market, its officials admitted to the Second Congressional Commission on Education (Edcom 2) during a hearing on Thursday.
A report posted on the Edcom 2 website cited an analysis by the commission showing that many of the challenges identified in the 1990s remain true today since the recommendations of the First Congressional Commission on Education.
These include the “unresolved mismatch between college programs and jobs, the low proportion of accredited college programs, the imbalance in student enrolment in just three programs such as business administration, teacher education and engineering.”
“Research productivity has also lagged behind our Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) peers, with CHEd’s interventions to address it proving largely unsuccessful from 2000 to 2011,” it said.
Karol Mark Yee, Edcom 2 executive director, on Friday told the Inquirer that CHEd needed to do better in improving tertiary programs in line with the needs of the labor market.
He said teacher education, business administration and engineering have been the top programs in Philippine colleges and universities from 1989 until 2021.
“We should institute mechanisms to make sure higher education institutions’ program offerings should be aligned with national development,” Yee said. “We should complement this with an extensive labor market study so we truly know the needs of the market.”
No centralized data
Newly appointed CHEd Chair Shirley Agrupis told Edcom 2 members that her agency lacked data on the demands of the labor market.
“[CHEd has] no centralized data on the demand and thorough analysis of the demand from the industry and government sectors,” she said.
CHEd, she said, is facing structural and data issues that hinder its capacity to steer the country’s tertiary education system.
“[The] ideal academic setup insists that if, and only if, the provisions of [Republic Act Nos.] 7722 and 8292 are well-studied and well-implemented and well-monitored, there would be no challenges and this makes higher education governance more intricate than expected,” said Agrupis, who was quoted in the report posted on Edcom 2’s website. She was referring to the laws defining the mandate of CHEd and the powers of officials of state universities and colleges (SUCs).
Former CHEd Director Amelia Biglete cited administrative and manpower challenges that get in the way of focusing on tertiary education.
“Our problem in CHEd is [that] CHEd was expected to do regulatory function and developmental function,” Biglete was also quoted as saying in the Edcom 2 report.
CHEd, she said, has struggled with overseeing and monitoring higher education institutions (HEIs) because of its “lean and mean structure,” which includes a large number of contract-based personnel.
Records from CHEd showed that the country has more than 2,300 HEIs as of May, including state and private institutions and their satellite campuses. Metro Manila hosts the most HEIs, followed by Calabarzon (Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal, Quezon) region.
Yee recommended that the government should review CHEd’s responsibilities based on new laws, “and study regional manpower needs and if this is proportional to the number of HEIs they need to monitor.”
Focus on quality
Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, one of the four cochairpersons of Edcom 2, said CHEd should focus less on administrative approvals for state universities and concentrate on quality standards and educational planning.
“May I suggest institutionalizing regular activities [for CHEd] to determine what the country needs … and how to align higher education institutions to those demands,” Gatchalian said.
“Let’s review the mandates of CHEd … I think the SUC should be empowered and be accountable for their actions… I really believe it’s a management and a budget issue,” he added.
Tingog party list Rep. Jude Acidre, a commissioner of Edcom 2, called for an overhaul of CHEd’s institutional mandate to match current education and labor realities.
“I think it’s only fitting that we also update and strengthen the charter of CHEd to make it fit for the realities of today and the demands of tomorrow,” Acidre said.
Edcom 2 is set to evaluate the charters of the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority on July 10 and of the Department of Education on July 17.
