Honeyman: SRA

Monday, September 12, 2011

SRA predicts that our sugar production for 2011-12 will be 2.4 million tonnes. It has allocated 72% for B (domestic market) sugar. Once again, SRA fails to explicitly recognize the existence of smuggling and the highly deleterious impact that it has on our industry.

Customs Commissioner Angelito Alvarez is determined to go out with a bang. Last week, BOC unearthed a combination of smuggled rice and sugar worth P50 million in a Caloocan City warehouse. This represents the contents of 50 missing containers. Since there were 1,910 container vans which went missing while en route from the Port of Manila to Batangas, the Caloocan find is small but significant.

Have something to report? Tell us in text, photos or videos.

Eradicate smuggling and we eradicate the need for D sugar and the low price it attracts.

We want Beamers for our planters as well!

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Tertiary Education

The national conversation is maturing. When an international survey shows us in a bad light, we no longer say, petulantly and dismissively ‘That’s just their opinion.’ Now we say ‘what can we do to make improvements?’

Last week’s example was of an international comparison which showed that no Philippine university was ranked in the top 300 schools in the world. We would like to examine why this is so.

The survey, conducted by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), a London-based company specializing in education and study abroad, has been producing results for several years. If we look at the past, things now are not quite so bad as we may think. What may be of greater interest is the fluctuating fortunes of our ‘Top Four’ universities – UP, De LaSalle, Ateneo de Manila and UST. Relevant data are as follows:

University of the Philippines

Year QS Rank Philippine Rank

2005 372 1
2006 299 1
2010 314 2
2011 332 1

Ateneo de Manila University

Year QS Rank Philippine Rank

2006 484 3
2010 307 1
2011 360 2

De La Salle University

Year QS Rank Philippine Rank

2006 392 2
2010 451-500 3
2011 551-600 3

University of Santo Tomas

Year QS Rank Philippine Rank

2006 500 4
2010 551 – 600 4
2011 600+ 4

To summarize the past six years:
1. University of the Philippines is reasonably level
2. Ateneo de Manila which, unlike the Supreme Court, has zero tolerance towards plagiarism, has improved markedly.
3. DLSU and UST have deteriorated significantly.

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Money, or the lack of it, was quoted as the major reason for our international weakness. This, of course, is valid but there are other factors as well.

Our top university, the University of the Philippines (UP), which ranked 332nd has a different role from, say, the University of Cambridge which ranked 1st. UP is explicitly concerned with helping poor but potentially able students to attain intellectual success. It is recognized that many students come from a public school background where many topics, necessary for normal university entrance, are not addressed properly. Math is a good example. UP handles this problem by having a Math foundation course which attempts to bring students up to a standard where good university math courses can be completed adequately.

The University of Cambridge has no such challenge. It selects students who have amazing accomplishments at school level and then takes them into the intellectual stratosphere.

But if universities were graded according to ‘value added,’ which would measure the improvements between attainment on leaving the university compared to attainment on entering, then UP would be ranked higher than 332nd.

The financial picture for UP is not good; budget constraints are becoming more severe. UP’s 2011 budget is P5.75 billion; 2012 will be P5.54 billion. A cut of P200 million for an institution that is already suffering is a serious blow. But we can understand that when our basic and compulsory education has been so grievously underfunded in previous years, then it needs to catch up, even at the expense of university education.

What to do?

The idea of tertiary education is that it provides a mechanism for good, well-paying jobs and careers for the qualified ones. In other words, tertiary education is an investment. It seems reasonable, therefore, that students should, in principle and if necessary, be prepared to take on loans in order to pay for their tertiary education.

We may think of Americans as being enormously rich. But they have enormous expenses as well. Few Americans complete their college degrees without incurring substantial debts which need to be paid off from their earnings once they start their careers. For example, President Obama was in debt from his college fees and was unable to completely repay until he was over forty and a Senator. The tertiary institutions he attended: Occidental College, Columbia University, Harvard University are all ferociously expensive, especially Columbia and Harvard.

It seems that a student loan scheme would also be appropriate in the Philippines. It is an open question as to whether this should be a state funded operation and/or whether the BSP can ‘persuade’ the retail banks to set aside funds for student loans.

We may be dismayed that UP is 332nd on the world ranking list but I would be surprised if many of the schools ranked higher have fees as low as UP’s. Since 2008, UP has charged P1, 000 per unit at Diliman and only P600 at UP Visayas. At 36 units a year we have that UP Diliman’s fees are P36, 000. Less than $1,000. In comparison, an American state university, also ranked in the 300s, would have annual fees of around $15,000.

So how about education tourism?

Incoming Tourism Secretary Ramon Jimenez would find that selling education is not as easy as selling Chickenjoy, but as a marketing supremo he would be able to find out what to do. We propose that non-Filipino students who are able to meet UP’s entrance requirements, pay fees of P5000 per unit. This is still chicken-feed for first world students and we believe a well-marketed campaign would attract many applicants. In Bacolod, Korean students have for several years been educational tourists taking, in the main, English courses which offer much better price/performance here than in Korea. We believe the education tourism concept can be broadened considerably. This would benefit our tertiary education sector and the whole economy.

The international ranking list used the twin criteria of academic performance and employer feedback to assess the relative merit of the various schools. One family member attended a UP Computer Science course at UP Visayas, Miagao, from 2004-2008. He did reasonably well and obtained a comfortable pass. Then comes the hard part: landing a job. One potential employer, a Cebu-based computer services company turned him down. Why? If it were due to his lack of team playing skills or generally inept social behavior we would understand. But no! He was rejected because he did not come up to the company’s technical requirements. In particular, he failed to convince the potential employer that he knew enough about relational database management systems, a topic which not handled particularly adroitly by UP’s computer science faculty. Hence UP’s 332nd ranking. Employers have mixed reactions to UP’s graduates.

On Thursday, UP president Alfredo Pascual is due to outline his vision for UP as a ‘great university.’ We wish him well.

Up UP!