Thursday, November 13, 2008 Alabado: Studying the future By Roberto P. Alabado III Planning Perspectives
IT IS enrolment time once more in the tertiary level of our educational system. Parents are busy looking for funds to pay for the college tuition fees of their dear students. All are hoping that their children will have a bright future once they graduate.
We all know that education is a key to a nation's success, but are we really focusing on the human resources need of our country and local government or are we just slaves to the international labor market? I know that these are hard times but are we really producing graduates who will become assets in developing our region and eventually our nation?
Almost every year, there are discussions about the apparent mismatch between the industry needs and the products of our educational system. Apparently, thousands of college graduates have skills and knowledge not needed by our local industry.
Let us look at the current favorite job of our fresh graduates - call center agent. While I agree that this type of job offers great opportunities for our fresh graduates but I am dismayed to see graduates of nursing, economics, political science, business administration working as call center agents. I am not insinuating that being a call center agent is an unproductive or unglamorous job, what I am driving at is the mismatch between the college degrees earned and the jobs that are available. Why did they have to undergo stringent college education, thesis, research papers and industry exposure and become call center agents after graduation?
Take a look at the mining industry, we have a rising industry in our midst and are we ready to supply the industry with locals? It was just recent that a state university started offering courses in geology and mining engineering here in Davao City, but it will take some years before they can produce graduates.
Do we have courses that deal with environmental engineering and other courses that will help protect our region from the negative impacts of such industry? Even if we have the courses but are our students interested in taking these courses?
Another sad thing is we have a huge surplus of nursing graduates in the country but our country still lacks health personnel to staff our public hospitals.
If we are to develop our cities and regions, our national government, local governments and business sector must now try harder to assist the education sector in designing courses that our nation truly needs.
I do not know if there is a long-term plan in identifying courses that have to be developed to keep up with the manpower requirements of our industries. This plan must be able to see the industry needs at least fifteen to twenty five years from now. This is because it may take time to develop the quality academic courses that will really answer to the standards required by the industries.
If, for example, we see that the future industries in our region will be more into food processing and manufacturing, then we should start redesigning our present academic programs like food technology to meet the future human resource demands of these leading industries and their ancillary services and industries as well.
Given the forecasts by both the government and the business sector we can provide our high school students and their parents with information on which courses to take so they have better chances in landing a local job in the future. Often times, students and their parents are just following the current demand and ignore the fact that it will take about seven years (four years of college, two years of studying and passing the licensure exam and other needed exams to work aboard, plus additional work experience) before they are qualified to work abroad and by then maybe there will no longer be a high demand for such specialization.
We live in a world that is mostly controlled by market forces and choices. I do not blame many of our young graduates for seeking to work abroad but I sure hope that when they get the chance to work abroad they will invest their hard earned money here in the Philippines. Maybe by that time our local governments can provide them with better investment opportunities designed to create businesses and employment to finally spur local development.
