College not for all

A look at the latest list of job vacancies from DOLE is instructive. Of the top 20 vacancies, only 6 require a college degree (three kinds of nurses, technology information officer, occupational therapist, technical support staff). The rest need only high school diplomas (if at all) or, at most, a couple of years of post-secondary education.

When we talk about the mismatch between education and industry, here is a clear mismatch: we think we need college education to get jobs, when industry itself does not require college degrees for most of its available jobs.

The Presidential Task Force for Education (PTFE) has hit upon the correct solution to this mismatch. It recommends that we should not expect everybody to go to college. In technical language, this is called streaming.

The PTFE recommends that high school graduates be streamed into either college or technical-vocational (tech-voc) programs.

For tech-voc, our current ten-year basic education cycle is enough. With some improvements to be brought about by moving some college General Education Curriculum (GEC) subjects down to high school, the public school system should be able to prepare students to go into a tech-voc program that may take anywhere from one to three years. After that, the students can join the job market immediately.

For college-bound students, the current ten-year basic education cycle is definitely not enough, for reasons I already spelled out in previous columns. For these students, a two-year transition course is necessary. This is the Junior College or Pre-University (or whatever name it will eventually be called) that I am talking about.

If what is left in the GEC is incorporated into this Junior College, then real college work can be done in only two or three years, as in most of the other countries in the world.

Here is the PTFE recommendation:

Everybody goes through six years of elementary school and four years of high school (plus preschool and kindergarten, where feasible). This is the DepEd cycle as we now have it. Except for updating and revising the high school curriculum, the status quo is maintained as far as DepEd is concerned.

After high school, everybody takes an exam. Those that pass the exam may go to the university stream. Those that do not pass the exam may go to the polytechnic stream (polytechnic sounds much better than tech-voc). Those that pass the exam, of course, may also decide for personal reasons not to go to a university but to go to the polytechnic stream or, in fact, to work immediately in a job that does not require anything more than a high school diploma.

Those that finish a polytechnic program but, for personal reasons, want to go to a university anyway have to take equivalency or accreditation courses to catch up with those already in the university stream. In effect, no one is being stopped from getting an undergraduate degree. Those not passing the exam, however, have to take more time to get a degree (one to three years of polytechnic plus another two years of pre-university validation). Another way of putting it is this: those not ready to go to a university will have to spend a lot of years getting ready.

Those qualifying for entrance into a university will take two years of Junior College, to be administered by universities themselves. In these two years, all skills and GEC courses will be taken. Since the GEC today actually takes up almost two years anyway, there is no time lost with this arrangement. Students now actually take Junior College, except that they think that it is part of college proper.

The real difference lies in college proper. All undergraduate degrees will now need at least two years more after Junior College. In effect, everybody will need at least four years to get a college degree (exactly the same as today!). These two years, however, unlike today, will be spent only on professional courses. We will not have the kind of irrational mixing that our schools often do with GEC and major subjects. Instead, we will follow the European model or the American (Yale) model, which distinguishes sharply between years spent on general education and years spent on major courses.

For those degrees that do not need international accreditation, students will use two years for major courses. This means that undergraduate courses in arts and sciences will have a total of four post-secondary years (exactly the same as we have now).

For those degrees that need international accreditation through the Bologna Accord (which requires 15 years from Grade 1), students will have to have three years after Junior College. This means that Accountancy, Pharmacy, Physical Therapy, and some other majors will have a total of five post-secondary years (this is not what we have today for some of these majors).

For those degrees that need international accreditation through the Washington Accord or the APEC Registry (minimum: 16 years), students will have to have four years after Junior College. This means that Engineering and Architecture will need six post-secondary years (this is not what we have today). (To be continued)