More ideas from teachers

College teachers, since they are most affected by the enrollment gap in 2016, have been brainstorming about what to do. Here are some of their ideas (some admittedly wild, some clearly doable):

1. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) can offer their teachers as trainers and/or creators of training materials for industries that sorely need training. English teachers, for example, can easily teach English to call center applicants. Psychology teachers can design ways to lessen the stress of call center employees. Filipino teachers can train call centers using Filipino (yes, there are quite a number of those). Math teachers can train Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firms that specialize in backroom processes involving math.

During the gap or lean years, HEIs can make this kind of service to companies a school concern. With their experience, administrators can easily form a Center for External Training (or something like that). The income from companies should offset the loss from tuition.

2. Administrators can start offering Special Education (SPED), which should not end with high school anyway. Since SPED students pay higher tuition and since they do not really follow the regular sequence of grades, there should be enough such students to sustain a small school during the lean years.

3. Some, if not many, teachers are willing to forego salary increases and bonuses during the lean years, in order to help schools manage their bottom line. Some teachers are even willing to take a pay cut just for the lean years. There is no lack of teachers that love schools so much that they are willing to sacrifice for a couple of years, just to help their schools survive.

4. Administrators should consider removing department chairs. (Remember, these are teachers talking, and we know what many of them think about department chairs.) The idea is to save administrative costs by flattening the organizational chart. Especially if a school is not very big and the teachers are self-starting and competent, there is really no need for someone to supervise fairly small programs.

5. Field teachers to companies in a kind of adult or professional On-the-Job Training (OJT). One of the most common and valid observations made about college teachers is that they do not have practical experience in what they are teaching. If they had such experience, they tend to have been employed outside academe back when they were younger and times were very different.

One major university, for example, once built a hotel on its campus. In the beginning, teachers of Hotel and Restaurant Management were asked to run the hotel. The teachers made such a mess of it that the university lost a lot of money. When students were made to run the hotel, the hotel broke even.

This is not an isolated case. We have teachers of finance who teach students how to play the stock market, yet they themselves have not made millions from stocks. We have teachers of political science who naively believe media reports about the government. We have teachers of mass communication who have never been inside a police station to report crime stories.

We have teachers of English who ask their students to write term papers, but who could not write a decent term paper if their jobs depended on it. In fact, we have teachers of English (I have seen this myself, even in the best schools) who mispronounce words and mangle grammar.

We have teachers of literature who have not read a book of poetry since they were in college. We have teachers of mathematics who cannot solve a word problem but have to rely on the answers found at the back of a textbook or in a teacher’s guide. We have teachers of religion who are, well, not exactly paragons of virtue.

The old adage that said, “If you can’t, teach,” is unfair to many good teachers, but it unfortunately describes too many college teachers. Perhaps the lean years can be a good time to get teachers to experience the world outside campus.

Investing in Teacher OJT (paying salaries even if there are no classes on campus, providing insurance, coordinating with companies) will be worth it, if a school eventually attracts a lot more students because it gets the reputation that its teachers are all practitioners or, at least, have worked very recently in whatever field they are in.

Finally, and this is not from teachers but from me, HEIs should consider putting up senior high schools (SHS). It is estimated that more than a million students will be entering Grade 11 in 2016. There will not be enough public high schools with SHS to accommodate them. State universities and colleges (SUCs) are also constrained by various regulations from accepting the bulk of these Grade 11 students.

Private HEIs are in a good position to put up their own SHS. Of course, there are bureaucratic processes to be followed to get permits, but administrators are used to bureaucracy anyway. College teachers can be assigned to teach SHS subjects, while still retaining their college ranks and salaries.

This is a Four Win solution: Grade 11 students will have more choices, college teachers can continue working, HEIs will survive financially, and DepEd need not put up so many SHS.