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UNEMPLOYMENT and underemployment continue to be
perennial problems. These problems are caused by many factors.
Recently, Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Romulo Neri called
attention to one of these factors when he said many of the graduates
our schools are producing have skills that are not employable in
today’s workplaces.
Neri said, “Many students are
taking courses that will not land them jobs needed by industries.”
This, in effect, is saying that joblessness is not caused by the
economy’s inability to generate new jobs. There are jobs out
there, available for the taking, most probably in the
business-process outsourcing (BPO) and the knowledge process
outsourcing (KPO) industries, in the electronics and in the
information and communication technology (ICT) sectors. It’s just
that there aren’t enough graduates to fulfill the demand for
workers in these areas.
What we need, says Neri, are more
engineers, more ICT grads, more people to go into the sciences where
there are economic and employment opportunities.
This is not a revelation. Labor
market imperfections and the lack of information about market supply
and demand are issues that have been discussed and debated for so
long. Solutions for these have been proposed, legislated and laid
down as state policies.
When the Congressional Commission
on Education or EDCOM, of which I was a member (as senator),
submitted its findings to Congress, several of our policy
recommendations were meant to address these very issues, like
greater institutional collaboration between the industries with
their respective chambers of commerce and the educational sector, or
for the government to provide a labor-market information system. Of
course, not all of our recommendations were translated into laws and
policies, but the ones that were should be enough to make a dent on
the jobs-skills mismatch problem. That is, if they are implemented
properly.
For instance, we have, or at
least we should have as mandated by law, a public employment service
office in every province, key city or town; and one of the
responsibilities of this office is to facilitate the exchange of
labor market information between job seekers and employers. It
should also establish a national manpower registry of skills needed
and so far provided to facilitate employment assistance.
It’s the implementation
that’s the killer. Our Constitution mandates that education should
get the highest budgetary priority but it only gets that on paper.
Debt service practically takes the proverbial biggest piece of the
pie.
Our Constitution says quality
education should be made accessible to all citizens. The restored
Congress (from 1987-1992) of which I was a part as senator was very
responsive to this mandate. We established a system of free public
high-school education. We institutionalized financial assistance to
private schools through R.A. 6728, or the Government Assistance to
Students and Teachers in Private Education. We established tuition
fee supplements, the high-school textbook assistance fund, an
expansion of the Educational Service Contracting Scheme, the voucher
system of the Private Education Student Financial Assistance,
scholarship grants to top honor graduates from high school, an
educational loan fund and a college faculty development fund, the
Special Program for Employment of Students to help poor but
deserving students. We had EDCOM. We expanded scholarships in
science and technology.
Yet, with all these laws, all
these government assistance programs, we have little to show for
them. Our public schools students are falling below national
standards in the sciences, in Math and English. These students would
like to but can afford to go to private schools (whose graduates may
be just a little bit better). They have no access to state
financing, which should be available if only we don’t allocate
taxes elsewhere. Overall, the level of functional literacy among our
high-school graduates is very low. And yes, our graduates are still
not that employable. In the BPO sector, one of the few bright spots
of the economy, and one of those industries direly in need of new
workers, our graduates can barely make the grade. Only two to five
out of every 100 applicants are able to pass the admission tests of
the call centers.
The results would have been a lot
brighter had we put money and resources behind our education laws
and policies, enough to ensure their effective implementation.
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