College education

How useful is a college diploma? According to The Economist, “A university degree no longer seems to offer much protection from joblessness.”

In the US, college education no longer seems worth the heavy debt load students end up with.

Times are getting hard even for middle-class Americans. Current generations find it necessary to live with their parents after graduation because they can’t afford the ever-rising cost of living, if they even get a job at all.

A college degree had always been the dream of many Filipinos as their means to break out of poverty. But diploma mills give them diplomas with little value in the job market.

We have this never-ending paradox of college graduates struggling to find jobs while industries struggle to find job applicants with the skills they need.

The Philippine Business for Education has consistently highlighted a significant disconnect between what schools teach and what employers require. PBEd sees a structural failure in the education-to-employment pipeline.

A few weeks ago, the Commission on Higher Education attempted to revise the general education (GE) curriculum for college education. CHED wanted to make graduates more employable and avoid redundancy of subjects already taken up in Senior High School.

However, it triggered an intense backlash from top universities, faculty unions and student groups. CHED was forced to retreat.

Elite universities argued that higher education must promote holistic human development. They warned that a “short-term” focus on workplace demands strips students of the moral judgment and critical thinking needed to navigate a society plagued by disinformation and rapid AI adoption.

It isn’t as if our universities are doing a good job of producing graduates with critical-thinking skills. BPOs and corporate employers have been complaining about the inadequacy of college graduates in communication and critical thinking.

As for moral judgment, many of our public officials, especially those educated by our elite universities have obviously failed to imbibe good moral (and ethical) judgment. Those GE college units have been a pure waste of time. Just look at some of our senators.

One other point: Singapore, a city-state with a population less than Metro Manila has two of its universities among the top 12 in the world. The best for us is the University of the Philippines, ranked at #362. At ang yabang pa namin sa Diliman sa lagay na yan.

The more real concern of protesting academics, if they are to be honest, is the threat to their livelihood. Thousands of teachers are at risk of being displaced or seeing their hours heavily slashed if the required GE units are cut in half. Then again, if they are any good, they shouldn’t remain jobless.

CHED has a point. Most students seeking a college diploma want to be quickly hired after graduation. Given our limited economic resources and high unemployment/underemployment, that’s also good for the country.

But it shouldn’t be just one or the other. Many of the “soft skills” businesses demand (critical thinking, communication, problem-solving and emotional intelligence) are exactly what universities mean by developing the “whole man.” The failure lies in how universities teach these concepts theoretically, while businesses need them applied practically.

There’s similar soul-searching in the United States. For a while, a STEM degree was considered the surefire way of landing a job in the tech sector. Not anymore in the age of AI.

Ironically, it’s now being recognized that college courses in philosophy, history or literature help build critical thinking, contextual reasoning and ethical judgment. These skills are essential for evaluating AI-generated work and creating innovative AI prompts.

Today, business and industry need workers with wide-ranging knowledge of human behavior along with enough technical and AI literacy to use AI as a creative tool.

Appreciation of the humanities is useful not just for Silicon Valley jobs. 

I recall reading an article about a doctor of medicine in the US with a humanities college degree but who later decided to study medicine. He claims his humanities exposure prepared him to be a better physician, with better abilities to empathize with patients than colleagues with regular pre-med preparations.

While it might seem counterintuitive, there is empirical evidence that validates the claim that pre-med students with a background in the humanities (such as English, philosophy, history or the arts) often exhibit higher levels of empathy, resilience and clinical communication skills compared with their peers who are traditional STEM majors.

Top-tier medical institutions like Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Georgetown have integrated “Medical Humanities” programs. They utilize poetry, art analysis (to improve visual observation during diagnosis) and reflective writing to actively combat the steep drop in empathy that traditionally happens during demanding residency training.

Majoring in literature or history requires students to deeply analyze text, interpret human motivations and imagine themselves in the shoes of diverse characters. The humanities teach students how to operate within gray areas where there are no clear-cut answers.

Maybe the Ateneo School of Medicine program should have chosen a Master’s in Humanities in their program instead of Business Administration. Too many doctors are already very money-oriented, and we need more doctors with more humanity in treating their patients.

It’s the same thing with the BPO industry, our biggest employer. Handling an angry customer complaint requires a great deal of empathy that a STEM major cannot always provide.

Going back to the CHED proposal, we should allow them to pilot test it in a dozen or so universities nationwide to see how it works. The worst thing is to be stuck in controversy and do nothing.

Let the CHED do its work. It will take a few years to make a good assessment, based on empirical data from the pilot test. Not based on the biases of current academics who fear for their jobs.

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on X @boochanco