At the recent World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, the United Arab Emirates, through the Dubai Future Foundation, launched its first global State of the Future report, which cites trends in seven key areas and the role of technology in those areas.
Education was one of the report’s focus areas, highlighting how wider Internet connectivity, improved virtual-reality technology and breakthroughs in biology and chemistry will drastically change how societies educate their people.
The report paints an exciting, technology-driven future for education. It also raises controversial and relevant issues of today. For one, inequity in higher education persists—the problem of the so-called college-completion gap. Around the world, up to 72 percent of students from the top income bracket graduate college versus only 7 percent from the lowest bracket.
Another issue is the imperative for curriculums to be updated and for employers to work more closely with educational institutions. The world of work is changing so fast that up to 60 percent of our schoolchildren today will be employed in jobs that do not even exist yet, while 50 percent of students do not even know the requirements for well-known professions today.
The above issues relate to the equity and quality of education our children receive. And they have some relevance to the ongoing debate on our government’s efforts to provide free college.
Last December, Congress submitted to President Duterte a proposed national budget that allocated up to P8.3 billion for the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) for free tuition for all students in state universities and colleges (SUCs).
The CHED issued a position paper welcoming the intention of lawmakers “to infuse more funds into public higher education,” but asserted that the proposal would have an unintended regressive impact. The paper cited the government’s 2014 Annual Poverty Indicators Survey, which revealed that only eight out of 100 college-age students (17 to 24 years old) come from the poorest 20 percent of the population, while close to 27 percent belong to the richest 20 percent. Under this situation, the free-college proposal would effectively mean the government will be subsidizing the education of those who could afford it, at the expense of those who need more than tuition assistance (e.g., living and book allowances) to complete their higher education.
The position paper also said the proposed free-tuition policy—employing a blanket, one-size-fits-all approach—must be weighed against the greater need for enormous strategic investments to raise the quality of the country’s higher-education system. For instance, between 2010 and 2012, the Philippines spent only $548 per capita for higher education, which includes teacher salaries and funding for research and development. In stark contrast, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam spent more than twice that, while Malaysia and Singapore invested 17 and 29 times more, respectively.
President Duterte signed the 2017 national budget. He appears to have heeded the concerns of the CHED, and issued a conditional veto, barring the implementation of the free college tuition policy until the CHED and the Department of Budget and Management issue guidelines that give priority to financially disadvantaged but academically-able students.
That is an eminently sound position.
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