Millions of "educated unemployables"

The labor and employment economists call this phenomenon a JOB MISMATCH, that is, our millions of diploma holders are not the ones being needed by our industries and economic enterprises. That simply means that our schools are producing graduates whose competencies are entirely irrelevant to the socio-economic thrusts of our country. That only means that the education sector is not communicating with the economic and industry sector. We have a big problem. The schools are raking in millions in tuition fees from poor students whose diplomas would be useless in the real world. Something should be done. And urgently.

 In last Monday’s Senate budget hearing, all executives administering the DOLE, TESDA, OWWA, POEA, NLRC and the National Maritime Polytechnic were given a long and intensive discourse on this national malady of diploma mills, producing endlessly these millions of highly educated unemployed. Senator Franklin M. Drilon, who chairs the Senate Committee on Finance, and Senator Edgardo J. Angara, Vice Chair, bewailed the proliferation of this chicken-and-egg syndrome involving the schools which are inclined only to pursue their profit motivation, without due regard to their impact to national development.

 The country’s  hundreds of universities and colleges, both public and private, like virtual diploma mills, keep on producing graduates whose college courses can not be used by the country’s economic and industrial enterprises. We have a tremendous oversupply of nurses, teachers, IT and engineering graduates who could not even pass the Board Examinations, neither could speak fluent English or talk sense, much less find suitable jobs in the labor markets, both domestic and foreign. The bottomline is alarming: We keep on producing diploma holders that are incompetent, ignorant or mediocre. The employers are not expected to absorb these incompetents.

 It is embarrassing to note that less than half of our yearly graduates, numbering about 400,000, could make it in the Board and Bar Examinations. According to my close friend, Atty. Teresita Manzala, who is now the incumbent Chair of the Professional Regulation Commission, in 2011 alone, merely 18% passed the Board Exams for elementary teachers and 26 % among high school teachers. That means, we have schools that produce mediocre teachers, who are in turn, bound to perpetuate and propagate the culture of mediocrity to the next generation of mediocres.

 Only 48% of our nursing graduates could make it in the Board every year, 45 % for accountants and a little more than 50% among mechanical and mining engineers, much much worse when it comes to civil engineering and electrical engineering. In the field of Law, the passing rates in the Bar exams ranges from a high of 40% to a low of 18%. Anything higher than 40% would be deemed statistically improbable.

 In this country, families would beg, steal or borrow, mortgage and pledge anything and everything just to send children to universities and get diplomas, earn medals and ribbons and hang them proudly in the walls to show off to visitors and relatives. Diplomas are the tickets to social climbing in a highly competitive world. The problem is that the courses completed may not be the demand in the labor markets. Parents don’t want their children to get some certificates from TESDA on welding, plumbing, basic electronics, and other vocational and technical courses. Because of job mismatch, they end up being call center agents in the burgeoning BPO industry.

 We have teachers who flunk the Board after multiple tries, ending up as household service workers in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia or Kuwait or as caretakers in Taiwan, or as casino attendants in Malaysia and Las Vegas. We have doctors who downgrade themselves to work as nursing attendants or physical therapists and engineering graduates who work as factory workers.

It will take no less than the President, as the head of state and the head of government to direct his Secretaries of Education, CHED, Industry, NEDA, TESDA and DOLE to jointly and urgently address this malady.  As pointed out by Sen. Drilon, there are idle workers’ funds (not government money) held in trust by OWWA to the tune of P13 billion and by the Employees Compensation Commission, held by the SSS and GSIS, in the total amount of P39 billion. A part of these should be allocated to fund the massive retraining of our workers and address the job mismatch that we are seeing in the Philippine labor market.