Where are our college graduates?

In developed countries like the United States, one of the most reliable predictors of personal success is college education. Whatever the particular operationalization of success – whether it is used to refer to one’s material well-being, intellectual sophistication, high social status or confident self-regard, or, more often than not, a combination of all these dimensions – people with tertiary or college education are demonstrably ahead of those who lack this attribute. It could well be that in developed societies, more than race, ethnicity, religion or political ideology, it is educational level, in particular college education, which now increasingly determines whether a person succeeds or fails in life.

In developing countries like the Philippines, it is much easier to note that those who run the government, the economy and generally speaking society’s innumerable civil society institutions are people who mostly have earned a tertiary-level degree. There is general recognition of this association between college education, personal success and political or economic influence among Filipinos. This perceived link inclines even the poor to drastically cut their food and other expenses so at least one family member finish college.

College education for at least a critical mass of the population is an imperative of modern times. The management of contemporary societies – developed as well as developing – has become complex enough as to demand at least a basic understanding of how political systems work, how economies function and how technologies of production, communication and transportation operate. With governance increasingly concerned with issues of cultural heritage, ecological sustenance, human rights, gender equity and demographic optimization, the authorities and their bureaucracies cannot rely on inadequate or unreliable information, traditional feel and dead reckoning. Neither can a citizenry continue with much ignorance or gross unfamiliarity with the workings – more often than not, the deliberate non-workings/fallings – of their society and its various subsystems.

A good college education is precisely one that enables people to recognize the dynamics of their nation’s history as well as its contemporary times and to situate such dynamics within an even more extensive context of globalization. It teaches them to appreciate the need for basic skills such as analytical reasoning, technical processing and effective communication.

Functional college education sensitizes people to the world of beauty accessible through the arts. Good college graduates are not simply technically-tracked; they are also aesthetically-oriented. Their physics, chemistry and mathematics do not disable them from appreciating music, poetry or sculpture. Their arts and their sciences are ever conjoined domains, each one inspiring and contributing to the growth of the other.

At the same time, a responsible college education firms up basic values that fortify a person’s sense of commitment not only to oneself and one’s immediate family but also to one’s nation and ultimately to humanity.

Guided by the above sense of what a meaningful college education is, how many college graduates are produced by the Philippine educational system? Public statistics in this regard misrepresent a horrible reality. Practically all so-called college graduates can be suspected of being no more than poor shadows of what they are supposed to be. Those that meet the decent standards of college education and are properly college graduates are the very exceptions that prove the rule of substandard college graduates.

The very capable and extremely candid Raul Roco, the present Secretary of Education, vows never to be a bar examiner for as long as he can help it. On national TV, he recalls examination papers by the bulk of law graduates who appear unable to express their thoughts and thus must be suspected of being unable to think at all. (It is quite possible that the former senator quit the prestigious Senate for the Department of Education precisely to ensure that college graduates are at least able to think and express themselves clearly.)

Secretary Roco’s predecessor – perhaps an even more candid public official – actually also described our educational system as paradoxically miseducating students more the longer they stay in it. Following the logic of his observation, college graduates must be the most miseducated of the lot.

This columnist has almost forty years of UP college teaching behind him. In frequent discussions with concerned colleagues, a common observation is the terribly deteriorated stock of college students even in the country’s best university. Often unable to engage in elementary analysis, clearly deficient in intellectual processing and communication skills, far too many students pass the university’s admission test and later on course examinations without acquiring a proper college education. (Part of the reason may have to do with faculty members who mistake UP to be a pontifical and charitable institution come the time to grade their students.

It is very difficult to have enough college graduates when even UP freshmen – conversant with textbook discussions of tomatoes – are unable to recognize a live tomato plant set before the class by an empirically-minded instructor. By the time they become seniors and are ready to put on cap and gown, they not only are unable to identify tomato plants; they also are much puzzled by who Nick Joaquin might be. With or without a UP diploma, such people do not have a college education even as the nation’s official counting system might mark them as college graduates.