|
By Max de Leon, Reporter
It’s graduation time again.
To parents and guardians, seeing their children
walk on-stage in toga and get the ceremonial handshake from school
officials means the fulfillment of a daunting
responsibility—providing children with education. To the
government, graduation of college students means new entrants to the
labor force, or, to put it bluntly, another surge in the
unemployment rate.
This is why in April 2002, when the new batch of
graduates joined the hunt for jobs, the number of unemployed in the
country rose to 4.8 million from 3.4 million in January of the same
year.
This school year the Commission on Higher
Education estimated that there would be 364,672 tertiary graduates.
So by next month at least 3,923,672 individuals
would be unemployed if the new batch of graduates is added to the
number of jobless persons in January 2003, which is 3,559,000. The
labor force would then be at least 34,042,672 from the January
figure of 33,678,000.
The numbers look scary for the new graduates,
but they are not surprised every time they see long queues of
applicants for the jobs they would be seeking.
The Department of Labor, the Commission on
Higher Education and the private sector agree that one big factor
that contributes to this huge unemployment is the mismatch between
the skills possessed by the labor force and the job market.
“This mismatch is compounded by the dying
domestic industry and the shrinking manufacturing sector,” Donald
Dee, president of the Employers’ Confederation of the Philippines,
said.
In 2000 the share of the industry sector in the
gross national product was 32.7 percent. This dropped to 31.7
percent in 2002. The share of the sector in the employment rate also
declined by .4 percent from January 2002 to January this year.
Dee said one major reason for the decline is the
“politicized wage system” that is killing the industry.
“Companies die because of this system. We must stop politicizing
wages. Workers have the right to wage increase, but what Labor
Secretary Patricia Sto. Tomas should really focus on is lowering the
cost of living,” Dee said.
Sto. Tomas noted in a speech that labor market
indicators “reflect a serious mismatch problem.”
Highlighting the mismatch between the graduates
being produced and the demand in the job market, Sto. Tomas said, is
that from 1990 to 2000, one-third of the unemployed actually went to
college.
Also, during the same period, three of every 20
college-educated workers were underemployed or were still looking
for additional hours of jobs.
If the trend holds, this means that in January
this year, 1,186,333 unemployed persons are actually
college-trained. So by April when the new graduates look for jobs,
they will be competing with 1.18 million past graduates and hundreds
of thousands more who are underemployed.
Even the Commission on Higher Education, in its
strategic issues for 2002 to 2006, admitted a mismatch between the
curriculum and the needs of the industry.
A breakdown of the estimated graduates by
discipline group for this school year will better show the picture.
Although it continues to suffer a decline in
demand, business administration and related courses remain the
highest producer of graduates with 105,000. The number has grown by
23 percent since 1995 even with the downsurge of its importance in
the job market. Research by the Employers’ Confederation of the
Philippines shows that graduates will find it hard to find work
unless they embark on a business of their own.
This discipline group alone accounts for 29
percent of the estimated total graduates for the year.
Consistent at No. 2 is education and teacher
training with 73,686 expected new graduates. Since 1995 this
discipline group has recorded a yearly growth in the number of
graduates. It registered a 68.7-percent rise from 1995 to 2003. If
they want to find jobs, these graduates should look overseas.
“There is an upsurge in the demand for
Filipino teachers in the United States, and China has expressed a
desire to hire Filipino teachers,” Sto. Tomas said.
Those who choose to remain in the country would
have to fight for 3,600 public-school teaching positions that the
Department of Education will open for the year and the demand of the
private schools.
From 2001 to 2002 employment in the education
sector increased by 1.6 percent from 920,000 to 935,000.
Running third is engineering, with 45,444
expected graduates for the year. Compared with the figures in 1995,
when its graduates stood at 46,090, the number dropped by 1.4
percent.
Dee said engineering graduates will have the
toughest time in getting the jobs that they spent time learning in
the colleges they came from.
“We produce mostly white-collar engineers.
They never get their hands on. Worse, they are not qualified to be
engineers in its strict sense,” Dee lamented.
What the labor market needs, he said, are those
who can fix the electronic machines like technicians. Because
schools no longer produce them, Dee said companies here have to
import technicians from neighboring countries like Taiwan.
Registering an alarming decline is medicine and
allied disciplines. In 1995 graduates in this discipline group stood
at 49,802. The number then had a steady decline up to this year,
when only 26,944 are expected to graduate, or a 45.89-percent drop.
This situation is saddening, because there is an
upsurge of demand for the sector internationally.
“The emerging trends in the health sector, for
example, in Europe, North America and Asia all point to an
increasing demand for services of our doctors, nurses, dentists,
caregivers, medical technologists, physical therapists and other
health-related workers,” Sto. Tomas said.
Even locally, employment in health services grew
by 10.8 percent from 2001 (314,000) to 2002 (348,000).
In mathematics and computer science, 33,318 are
expected to graduate this year and to crowd past graduates in the
information technology job market. The number is smaller than the
graduates in 2000, pegged at 34,015. But since 1995 it has risen by
56 percent.
Dee said these graduates, including those in
business administration and related courses, will probably end up as
encoders, programmers and operators in call centers.
Sto. Tomas said the Philippines is fast emerging
as the “call center capital of the world” owing to the
Filipinos’ ability to speak English. “Experts claim the
Philippines can grab a huge chunk of the global call center market,
estimated to be worth $42 billion by 2010,” she said.
Graduates in agriculture, forestry, fisheries
and veterinary medicine remained at a very low 13,449 this year.
The number is very small because the sector
accounted for 37 percent, or 11.12 million, of the total employment
in the country. This means the Philippines is still not producing
more experts in agriculture, forestry, fisheries and veterinary
medicine that would have fueled the country to better productivity.
“This is my frustration. UP Los Baños then
was a purely agricultural school; now agriculture is only a minor
course there. The reason for this is fewer people engage in the
sector because there is no payback,” Dee said.
He believes the government should devise a
mechanism for corporate farming and funnel more funds to
infrastructure projects for the faster transfer of goods to the
market.
The six mentioned discipline groups have been
the country’s top producers of graduates for a decade now. Their
total of 298,678 collectively represents around 82 percent of the
estimated total graduates for the year.
For the other discipline groups, the Commission
on Higher Education estimates that 13,048 will graduate with degrees
in social and behavioral science, 4,720 in mass communications and
documentation, 4,479 in natural science, 4,331 in the humanities,
2,320 in architectural and town planning, 2,079 in law and
jurisprudence, 2,152 in service trades, 1,207 in religion and
theology, 1,034 in fine arts and applied arts, 988 in home economics
and 23,348 more under unlisted disciplines.
Last year the six top discipline groups
represented 81.6 percent, or 294,101, of the total graduates of
359,085.
Of the total estimated graduates for 2003,
257,281, or 70.5 percent, came from private schools and 107,391 from
government schools.
If statistics from last year are used as a
gauge, 2003 graduates would have to wait for months before they
could get jobs.
In April last year or just about the time when
new graduates plunged into the labor force, the number of employed
in the country stood at 30,186,000. By July 2002 employment even
dropped to 30,104,000. Only in October did the number of employed
rise to 30,251,000, a mere increase of .22 percent from the April
figure.
As a glimmer of hope, the Department of Labor
plans to create 3 million new jobs, one million of them overseas.
The second million will be generated through government intervention
and the last million through the private sector.
But however rosy this plan may seem, the
comparative statistics in 2001 and 2002 show otherwise.
In 2001 the number of employed persons stood at
30.085 million. This rose to 30.251 million at the end of 2002. This
shows that the government ended up with only 166,000 new local
employed.
Also, the target deployment of one million
Filipino workers overseas was not met, because only 889,981 workers
made it to 165 destinations worldwide. Around 209,593 of them are
sea-based.
Of the unemployed in 2002, 49.5 percent of them,
or 1,694,385, belong to the 15 to 24 age bracket. This includes
graduates in the last three years who could no longer be absorbed in
the labor force owing to what Dee said is an “oversupply of
educated individuals.”
Sto. Tomas said the prevalence of the educated
unemployed is becoming serious in the labor market.
“Every March, the end of the academic calendar
in the Philippines, we are often faced with a high number of college
graduates competing with the unemployed for limited job
opportunities. But many companies claim that their posted vacancies
in the classified advertisements cannot be filled by the numerous
jobseekers. The failure to get a match is often a result of the
jobseekers’ inability to qualify for requirements needed by
employers,” Sto. Tomas said.
Labor Undersecretary Manuel Imson sees the need
to further revise the curriculum and the priority courses.
“There is a need for more fine-tuning so we
can factor in the realities that are existing, the realities in the
domestic labor demands and overseas. We still have courses that in
terms of projected job demand are not that strong. Still a lot of
students enroll there,” Imson said.
To correct this mismatch between the job market
and the number of graduates being produced, the Commission on Higher
Education set a goal to “develop a curriculum that is responsive
to the needs of the industry.”
To do this, the commission would have to
periodically review and revise the curriculum and the required
instructional standards to conform with the identified competency.
The commission will also come up with a list of
priority courses to guide its incoming grantees of the student
financial assistance programs.
The commission will identify these courses after
consulting with the National Economic and Development Authority, the
Department of Labor, the Philippine Association of State
Universities and Colleges, and the Coordinating Council for Private
Educational Associations.
The labor department is determined to solve the
problem of mismatch through its programs Phil-JobNet, Computerized
National Manpower Registry of Skills (CNMRS), job fairs, and the
Public Employment Services Offices (pesos).
Phil-JobNet is the on-line registration of job
applicants with modules on displaced workers, skills for hire,
off-line batch processing, and segregation of registrants’ data
for peso.
The CNMRS, established in 2002, provides
employers and policymakers information on Filipino manpower and
their corresponding skills and competency profiles. At the end of
2002, 931,000 Filipino workers registered in the CNMRS.
For its part, the labor department held job
fairs to give jobseekers and employers easy access to information on
skills and job vacancies at the community level. In 2002 it held
1,529 job fairs, placing 18,837 job applicants nationwide.
Besides these efforts, Labor Undersecretary
Imson said his department is now talking with the education
department about a program that would advise high school students on
what courses they should take when entering college.
He said secondary students should be informed
about what the local and global job market would need in the next
five years so they could decide which course to take.
Says Sto. Tomas: “Job-skill mismatch is a very
serious matter that must be addressed and given sufficient priority
if we are to effectively deal with our employment and
underemployment problems.”
|
