By Dino Carlo A. Saplala
Many schools and universities in the country had suspended onsite classes since March 10 of this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Both policy-makers and school administrators confronted a dilemma involving school operations and health considerations.
In terms of economic implications, schools are important for human capital development as education generates significant positive externalities for society. During the pandemic, this was weighed against the need to protect students and school personnel from the spread of the virus (and from the possibility of either getting sick or passing the virus to a more vulnerable member of the household).
As more parts of the country reopen the economy and relax quarantines, the education sector also becomes an important consideration especially as the country transitions to a new school year. The need to review and reinvent higher education follows from the continuing need to engage and support stakeholders, including faculty, school personnel, and most especially the students, during these times. One part of the sector, which stakeholders and the government may want to examine closer, is graduate level education, particularly with respect to the following points:
First, unlike the basic education and undergraduate levels, many disciplines in graduate education usually involve lower student-faculty ratios. It follows that social distancing protocols may be easier to implement at such set-ups. This could be due to the specialized nature of the activities involved. In addition, many students at the graduate level are part-time students who are studying while being employed elsewhere. Therefore, if these students are part of industries already open during lighter quarantines, physical interaction may not increase much if graduate schools were to re-open. This could be done for MGCQ or even GCQ areas, depending on how health protocols can be established and implemented for each context.
In terms of face-to-face interactions, schools can prioritize fields where facilities are more needed. Examples include science laboratories for science fields and medical schools. Incidentally, these fields are urgently needed today as society needs more health-care workers and scientists who can pursue research related to the pandemic. For some fields, distance education may be sufficient to provide the more essential competences of their programs. The graduate level is generally suitable for distance education (or can be designed to do so) as graduate students are expected to perform more independent study than their basic and tertiary education counterparts in many of the fields concerned.
Online education is another aspect worth developing in the Philippine context. In a 2008 article at the Studies in Higher Education journal, David Morris explored the potential of e-learning in terms of exploiting economies of scale and scope effects in the education sector. Morris also cited another study that illustrated that in some cases, economies of scale are present in graduate education and research, even if not necessarily in tertiary education. Scale and scope economies can be used to examine the internationalization trend in the past decade, which saw many universities send faculty and students abroad for exchange programs and form partnerships with other universities for research and knowledge-sharing purposes. Similarly, universities can form partnerships with schools in other regions and share content which could be used for different research and teaching contexts, including online. If the infrastructure is in place, this can allow students from more areas to benefit, even if the students don’t come to Metro Manila, for example.
If done online, an improvement in the digital infrastructure in the country is necessary and may not be immediately available. It is essential for the private and public sectors to step in to address stakeholders’ needs and immediately provide alternatives. Aside from improving Internet coverage, existing facilities can be rearranged for specific purposes. For example, library operations can be focused toward developing and acquiring online content for the use of faculty, students, and other community stakeholders. Computer laboratories in libraries and other school spaces can be used as alternatives that students without sufficient Internet access can use, even if there are no regular classes for the other students. To better match schools’ and students’ contexts, some aspects raised by this article can be decided on a regional basis.
Overall, graduate education can be very useful especially as society recovers from the pandemic. On a practical note, it may even serve as an alternative activity for those who lost jobs during the current crisis to upgrade their skills productively while waiting for the end of the crisis. The health sector and the economy will potentially benefit, but this depends on how stakeholders are supported by the private or public sector.
The author is a lecturer of economics at the Ateneo de Manila University. The contents of this education-related article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the university.