Germans to the rescue

Last April, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle delivered a speech at a conference on “German Businesses: Pioneers of the Dual System of Vocational Training Abroad.” In that speech, he called the German dual-tech system “a real export hit Made in Germany.”

He enumerated the benefits of the German system, such as “ensuring well-trained workers and low youth unemployment.” In his words (translated), “By combining practical work in companies and theory in the classroom, it makes it easier for young people to embark on a working life.”

I should mention, of course, that tech-voc in Germany enjoys as high, sometimes even higher, prestige than university training. That is the exact opposite of the situation in the Philippines, where college graduates are automatically, just because they have college degrees, considered more intelligent, more employable, more productive citizens than technical workers. (Nobody mentions that Filipino college graduates have a notoriously high rate of unemployment or that – ssshhh! – many Philippine colleges are glamorized high schools.)

Because of the thrust of the German Foreign Service, with some prodding from both my Filipino and German friends, Germany sent a team of government, industry, and funding agency experts to the Philippines early last month.

The team represented a wide variety of German organizations, such as the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Federation of German Industries, the Confederation of German Employers’ Association, the German Investment Corporation, the KfW Bank Group, the German Society for International Cooperation, the Savings Bank Foundation for International Cooperation, the Associations of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the Federation of Catholic Entrepreneurs, the German Confederation of Skilled Crafts, and AFOS Foundation for Entrepreneurial Development Cooperation. (These organizations all have German names, of course; these are just translations.)

The team went around the country, interviewing key officials of both the government and the private sector and observing for themselves some schools and corporations.

I cannot yet reveal the details of their mission, named “Project Appraisal Mission on K to 12 Plus Dual Training in and beyond the Education Reform K to 12,” but since they shared their findings with a large group of key officials of government and the private sector before they left, I should be able to mention some of these findings without violating confidentiality. What they will do with these findings is up to them, but at the very least, we now have external confirmation of some of our worst fears.

They found what we have known all along.

For example, they found that there was no system in place for Immersion or “practical training” in the K to 12 reform. They identified what they called and we call “the urgent need for qualified trainers, instructors, mentors, and training coordinators in companies.” As I warned in an earlier column, they found that training or OJT coordinators in companies were lacking in what they called “didactics” (in Philippine English, “pedagogy”).

In particular, they found these concrete needs of corporations (corporations, not schools!): “curriculum development, elaboration of learning materials, defining of learning activities, defining of trainers’ profiles, organization of practical learning processes.”

They also found that various laws that have to do with dual-training have to be amended. One such law, for example, forces companies to give sizeable allowances to interns; that will turn off Philippine businesses, which cannot afford to fund almost a million Grade 11 interns in 2016.

Most of all, they found that the public thinks lowly of technical-vocational graduates.

With good planning, good implementation, political will, and funding from local and foreign sources, we should easily be able to solve all of the problems except the last one.

Public perception of tech-voc graduates is completely different from what tech-voc graduates actually do and earn.

For example, even if the average monthly salary of a pipeline technician (P96,000 for a high school graduate with no college degree) or a buyer or purchasing agent (P72,000 for a high school graduate with no college degree) is higher than the average salary of most college graduates, it is rare for Filipino parents to encourage their children to skip college and take a TESDA course instead.

The highest paying job in the Philippines, for example, beating the average income of corporation vice-presidents, is that of a pilot. Except in the big airlines, being a pilot requires only a high school diploma and special training, not a college degree. (Salary figures are available at salaryexplorer.com or just Google “Best Paying Jobs in the Philippines.”)

If there is a mismatch between what schools offer and what industries require, there is an even more dramatic mismatch between what people actually earn and what people think they earn.

If we can get out of our irrational prejudice against tech-voc training, if we can get out of an even more irrational desire for everybody to get a college degree (after all, not even the most advanced countries in the world have all of their citizens going to college), if we can start looking at facts rather than fantasies, we might be able to get the 84% of Filipinos who have no college degrees to get good (sometimes even better-paying) jobs.

We might be able to solve poverty. But first, we must solve the poverty of our minds.