Philippine education crisis: A ticking time bomb?

OXFORD—The highly-regarded Times Higher Education (THE) world university rankings annually surveys more than 2,000 leading universities across 115 countries. The University of Oxford topped the global ranking for the 10th consecutive year. This was an unprecedented achievement by any higher education institution in the THE’s decades-long history. The survey is based on 18 key metrics under five major categories: teaching quality, research environment, citation impact and strength, international outlook, and industry impact. This was a major deal for Oxford, especially given its relatively limited resources compared to far better-endowed rivals in the United States and Asia. “Aside from having world-beating professors, they’re good at squeezing the most out of their limited resources,” a graduate physics student told me. Even more impressive, according to the physics scholar, are universities in places such as Iran, which have produced world-class scientists and engineers despite confronting decades-old challenges.

Several Iranian institutions even improved their ranking among the top 500 universities in recent years, most notably the famed Sharif University of Technology (SUT), which was bombed during the recent Israel-US aerial strikes on Iran. The SUT (top 150 universities in engineering courses in the THE survey) is among the top three destinations in the world for Olympiads, behind only the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cambridge. In contrast to postindustrial Britain and postwar Iran, universities in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies have been moving in the opposite direction.

In the latest THE rankings, the Philippines’ best-performing university (Ateneo de Manila University) did not even rank among the top 500 universities in the region. I remember how just over a decade ago we used to complain about why the likes of the University of the Philippines (UP) are no longer among the top 100 universities on Earth! Throughout the first decade of the 21st century, the “quartet” of UP, Ateneo, De La Salle University, and University of Santo Tomas managed to be featured among the world’s top 500 rankings. In 2009, Ateneo ranked 234th in the world, followed by UP (262nd in the world) in the QS Survey, which has a broadly similar methodology to THE. Lest Filipino academics whine about global rankings, let me refer you to the most rigorous Academic Ranking of World Universities survey, which heavily prioritizes citation impact, research output, and even the number of Nobel Prize winners. Guess what? No Philippine university has ever cracked the top 1,000 rankings there.

By mid-2010s, however, top Philippine universities gradually faded from the scene, which was followed by the “lost decade” under the Duterte administration: first came Rodrigo Duterte’s six-year presidency, which oversaw the historic mismanagement of the K-12 transition, followed by two years of total education disaster during the COVID-19 crisis, followed by Vice President Sara Duterte’s unparalleled incompetence at the helm of the Department of Education. The former education secretary was just as efficient in amassing hundreds of millions in confidential funds as she was inefficient in executing her duties. After her ignominious term, there was a shortage of 165,443 classrooms and 86,000 teaching positions, while only 30 percent of school buildings were in good condition.

No wonder then why the Philippines is at the bottom of global rankings, most notably in the Programme for International Student Assessment, with a whopping 90 percent learning poverty rate. Between 2019 and 2024, up to 18 million high school graduates were “functionally illiterate,” according to a study overseen by Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian. Clearly, underfunding is a major issue, with a World Bank study showing that our per capita primary education spending is 83.5 percent below the average for the East Asia and Pacific region and 29.5 percent below the average for lower-middle-income countries.

Funding is also a major issue for UP and other top universities, which have struggled to attract international faculty and incentivize high-quality research. Clearly, there is also a big problem with leadership, with the Duterte era coinciding with the elevation of countless apparatchiks to top positions in the education sector. In one top Philippine university, I noticed certain folks managed to become even department chairs and deans sans any high-impact research output. As the great investment banker Stephen CuUnjieng shared on my television show “The View From Manila” last year, the Philippines is so behind its peers in terms of education quality that tier-2 and even tier-3 technical universities in Vietnam seem more attractive to global investors than engineering graduates of our elite universities.

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