Tertiary Education in the Philippines
Over the past 10 years, I've worked with 26 universities in Mindanao, and have thus developed what I think are some reasonably accurate perceptions of the overall quality of those institutions vis vis those in the West. I've been fortunate enough to have attended two of the "top 20" in the US, so my standard of comparison might be somewhat too stringent. I've also done some work with the faculties at UP Diliman and Ateneo de Manila, so I've seen the best that this country has to offer.
As to Ateneo and UP, the problems I've experienced have little to do with faculty and much more to do with significant under investment in facilities and learning resources. Many of the faculty members with whom I've worked have earned their Ph.Ds at US or European universities, and they're first rate intellects with very good training who could probably teach anywhere. The issue for me is that even the elite schools here lack the research facilities that we take for granted, making it difficult for even well trained scholars to keep abreast of developments in their fields, much less teach to the state-of-the-art. There's no money to allow attendance at international conferences, little money to create labs and libraries and insufficient funds to maintain, much less improve physical plants, so educational quality that's related to those factors is diminished. Conversely UP and Ateneo, and to a somewhat lesser extent Sto Tomaso and De La Salle, draw their students from the pool of the best and brightest in the country--overwhelmingly from Metro Manila--and can afford to be selective. The academic standards are reasonably rigorous, but, especially in technical areas, the skills learned are often outdated given the lack of pedagogical resources needed to maintain currency. Finally, given that primary and secondary education here encompasses only 10 years--though this is changing--students historically have entered university at age 16, and thus lack two years of crucial foundational knowledge that most students in the West acquire in high school.
The situation in Mindanao universities--which I suspect are representative of provincial universities in general--is far more dire. Faculty in general are poorly trained, with many lacking any graduate credentials. Resources are extremely sparse, particularly at state-supported universities and curricula are lock-step, rigid, and allow little to know opportunity to pursue individual interests. Educational standards are extraordinarily low, and it's legitimate, I believe, to discount the quality of degrees offered by these institutions which lack the most basic resources that the rest of us might take for granted. I've often thought that my home library in the States was perhaps better than what I've seen in some of Mindanao's state schools, which fail to teach a "common core" of knowledge that most of us would consider essential. Finally, the universities here stress the acquisition of a limited range of technical skills (most of which are not taught to international standards) and fail utterly to create an "educated" group of graduates. To give but one example, HRM students spend inordinate amounts of time learning how to fold napkins, make beds, and wait on tables. There's no evidence I've seen to indicate that critical thinking is encouraged, and the level of English--which is putatively the language of instruction--is quite low. Unlike their analogs at the elite level, these universities deal, more often than not, with graduates of public schools, and they cannot afford--nor do they merit--the selectivity of the top four tertiary institutions.
If I may generalize, I think it's important to differentiate between the overall degree quality associated with maybe four elite schools, and all of the rest. Anyone who is able to overcome the deficits of a typical tertiary educational experience here deserves kudos, because there's simply no way that a typical graduate from a typical university here could compete successfully with a typical graduate of a Western institution.
GE.
