THE results are in. According to the results of the World University Rankings 2011 released by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), the University of the Philippines (UP) is the top Philippine university, besting other schools such as Ateneo and La Salle. But it’s not all good news. The results also showed that UP fell 18 spots to the 332nd place from last year’s 314th place.
Understandably, UP reaped criticism for its poor ranking. Putting a more positive spin to the results however, UP boasts that it retained its standing as the number one university in the Philippines notwithstanding its non-participation in the QS survey due to questions about the latter’s methodology and reliability. Education officials, on the other hand, were quick to argue that the QS survey doesn’t reflect the true condition of education or performance of schools in the Philippines. But these rationalizations are beside the point.
The furor over methodology, data or accuracy of the survey only obscures the distressing reality regarding the state of Philippine tertiary education – that in the past two decades, neither UP nor any other Philippine university has been highly ranked. The real concern, therefore, should not be whether UP rightly deserves its ranking at number 332 but rather, whether the Philippines’ top university can ever join the upper strata of world-class universities. So where lies the problem?
Militant student groups attribute this downward slide to government’s budgets cuts in higher education, a view echoed even by some education officials. Indeed, critics usually point to the insufficient funding and low priority given by the government to university education as the root of this malaise, the idea being that if more money is poured into education, the quality of the schools – ergo, the quality of education – will proportionately improve. While the idea that more government expenditure on education – or higher education-to-GDP ratio – leads to better schools has populist appeal, it is a simplistic and misleading approach to solving the “bugs” in our tertiary education system.
It is true there is a correlation between percentage of GDP spent on education and the rankings of schools in the QS survey. But third-world countries like Cuba and Vanuatu have the highest education-to-GDP ratios, and yet these countries can hardly be considered as intellectual hotbeds. So clearly, increasing government expenditure on education won’t necessarily fix the problem. In fact, other countries have done much more with less. How? By spending years building up and cultivating a few but world-class campuses stocked with the best faculty and the most prodigious students. Like the Indian Institute of Technology system – a group of world class, technology-oriented campuses throughout India. India’s strategy was to funnel its resources into creating a few first-rate universities instead of several lackluster ones.
In the Philippines, state universities and colleges are everywhere. Their creation is usually the result of nothing more than a politician’s vainglory. Instead of being regional “centers of excellence” most of them become “diploma mills” for a political constituency hungry for the status that a college degree brings. In some state colleges, 50 percent of the students are “scholars” of the incumbent politician. A privilege bestowed in aid of “reelection” rather than “education.”
And while the government has given education the highest budgetary priority as mandated by the constitution, it has not improved the quality of our schools or its graduates, not with all these state colleges and universities laying claim to precious but meager funds. The solution, therefore, is not simply to increase our budget for education but to direct our existing budget to a select number of state colleges and universities guaranteed to produce exceptional graduates and groundbreaking research.
Moreover, since the government’s sparse budget subsidizes students’ education at these state-funded schools, course offerings should be rationalized to meet the demands of public and private enterprise, with a bias for courses related to math and science. What the country needs is more engineers, accountants, scientists and researchers – and less tourism, HRM, nursing, and computer science graduates who usually end up under-employed, if they even get employed at all.
Clearly, solving this educational malaise means exercising unpopular but firm political will. Will the Aquino administration sacrifice its political capital to arrest the continuing decline in our tertiary education system? That remains to be seen. What is certain, though, is that if nothing is done and done soon, the diplomas from our state colleges and universities will no longer be worth the paper it’s written on.
