Where should education bring us?

This month is graduation time, and the country’s turn out of more or less 300,000 graduates each year is no small figure to talk about considering the ratio from among them that get employed, or better still, considering their employability both here and abroad.

The recent report on the deteriorating English proficiency among our graduates is no less alarming, not to mention the ever-rising unemployment rate due to the absence of viable jobs in the country.

This is one of the reasons why our graduates, especially of medical-related courses, train their eyes abroad for employment. It is no surprise that doctors, nurses and even midwives and physical therapists leave the country for good.

While this is the sad plight of our graduates, it is no issue that education is still the best hope for Filipinos to get even with our Asean neighbors. But certainly, something must be done to reconsider the present thrusts of our educational system and how it should go considering the inevitable need to globalize.

There is no question that education is the future for us, so it is needless to ask the question as the title below, rather, we should ask “Where should education bring us?”, to emphasize the fact that we should not only be made literate through education but that education should also lead us somewhere or towards a clearly defined path whose end is what the Philippines and Filipinos ought to be in the very near future.

This end should be achieved soonest because the fact is that it has been long overdue. It has been what the Philippine education should have been about two decades ago.

We have been mesmerized in awe by the fact that education has been getting the highest share from our national budget. True, but we have not asked how this budget compares with other ASEAN countries in terms of the GNP ratio.

The other point is, given our high literacy rate, that we had been so proud about, where should education focus at this point in time? What should be aptly considered by the public education sector, the private education sector, and the business sector? Where should each of these sectors focus their efforts on considering their expertise and what they can do better given the nature and scope of each of these institutions?

To understand this better, we shall feature an article by Mahar Mangahas, President and Founder of the famed Social Weather Station:

Social Weather Station

Will education be our future?

Sen. Edgardo J. Angara spoke on “Education is our future” at the Jaime V. Ongpin annual memorial lecture at the Ateneo de Manila University, Rockwell campus. I was a discussant of the lecture.

I said that I agree with almost everything Senator Angara said -- the global context, the general analysis, and certainly with the theme that education should be our future. (The only part I disagree with is on tax breaks for business. Business only needs them when projects do not promise a very high rate of return. When social returns are not well captured by business, projects are better done by non-business institutions.)

I said that education should already have been our present, if the call for a quantum leap in investments in science, technology, and innovation had already been heeded by the government two decades ago, when made by former University of the Philippines president Emanuel “Noel” Soriano, and others.

My question, “Will education be our future?” is really asking when will the government accept the responsibility, pay the cost, and follow the principles of global competition in undertaking the needed investment in education. In all countries, it is the public sector -- and not the private non-profit sector or the business sector -- that is responsible for the major part of elementary and high school education, graduate-school training, and research, in science. (Collegiate training is an area where private education can be dominant.)

Accept the cost. The first issue, the cost, is very well worth paying. Senator Angara’s norm of 1.0 percent of the gross national product (GNP) for research and development is the same as the one that Noel Soriano recommended long ago. On an annual GNP of P6.6 trillion (2006), 1.0 percent is P66 billion. But the Philippines is currently investing only one-tenth of 1.0 percent, i.e., P6 billion. Thus the immediate annual shortfall is P60 billion ($1.5 billion). When will the government commit to filling this financial gap? It isn’t too large. It isn’t enough to catch up with Singapore and Japan, which are investing 2+ percent and 3+ percent, respectively. It only serves for the Philippines not to fall further behind in the global race.

There is no investment without sacrifice. Increasing public investment requires raising the savings rate, and the tax rate, on the present generation and -- to the extent that investment is based on borrowings -- on future ones. Alternatively, funds for more R&D can be raised by reallocations away from other investments. For example, the P60 billion could be cut from annual national government spending on public works projects with a lower rate of return than the return on R & D. Perhaps the local governments should pay for those public works instead. And if no one can pay for them, then let us just do without them.

Pay people competitive rates. My second point is on government employment policy toward people in science. Education is a human-resource-intensive activity. Most of the people engaged in it are, and should be, government employees, not private employees. The fundamental way of mobilizing human beings is by offering attractive compensation for their work. When will the government accept the principle of paying globally competitive salaries for its own workers in science?

Such workers should be freed from the Salary Standardization Law. Their employers, such as the University of the Philippines (UP), should have authority to set their own internal salary scales. For that matter, the UP management should be free to set a salary scale for each field of specialization!

A serious push towards R&D entails mobilizing very many, very qualified, people very fast. We should think global, and recruit not only Filipinos but also all other nationalities, as do Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and, of course, the United States. Let us look for talented scientists from Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America who want to emigrate but are denied visas by Western countries for political reasons. Let us prioritize young and unmarried scientists, many of whom, through chemistry and biology, will naturally find Filipino partners. Let us give them family visas in order to encourage them to settle down here.

Involve private institutions. My third point is that the government should support research in private institutions also. Private universities cannot be expected to sustain research solely on the basis of tuition fees. Under market rules, tuition revenue will cover the costs of teaching time only, and not the costs of research time also.

Not more than half of a research professor’s time should be for teaching. The research time, particularly for basic research, should be funded by the government and philanthropic sectors. For instance, the National Science Foundation, the US government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all non-medical fields of science and engineering, funds both public and private research on the basis of competitive proposals -- an excellent case being its 1994 grant that led to the development of the search engine Google at Stanford University, which is private.

The whole world is competing for scientists. Education will be our future when the government invests at least P60 billion per year in it, pays market rates to people in science, and makes use of the entire research community. When will that be?