Poorly educated

I caught a portion of Richard Heydarian’s interview with international investment banker Stevie CuUnjieng on Facebook where he related the story of three of his clients with coders and engineers working in China. They were thinking of moving to Manila or Cebu but decided to invest in Vietnam instead.

- BOO CHANCO

Stevie told Richard that a big reason we lost out is that the engineers, coders and other tech staff available in Vietnam are better. The ones they have hired from La Salle, Ateneo, UP are not as good as the graduates from second tier universities of Vietnam.

Ouch! That should hurt the egos of graduates from these supposedly elite educational institutions here. Yet, it is not surprising based on the international ratings of our best universities compared with those in other ASEAN countries.

Also, analysis of the PISA 2022 results showed that the best Filipino students (presumably from elite private schools) were comparable to the average students in Malaysia and Thailand, and only performed on par with the weakest students in Singapore.

What happened? There was a time when foreign students came to the Philippines to study. We lost it.

I was covering the Senate when the bill creating the Commission on Higher Education or CHED was being discussed. The late senator. Ed Angara said that by removing supervision of higher education from DepEd and giving it to a dedicated agency, the quality of our higher education will improve. Unfortunately, CHED had been a big failure.

It gets worse. The current CHED Chair, Shirley Agrupis, pointed out that the June 2025 Labor Force Survey by the Department of Labor showed a 2.6-percentage-point increase in the number of unemployed college graduates from 35.6 percent in December 2024.

That is indeed, a “troubling increase” specially because the 35.6 percent of Filipino college graduates who can’t get jobs in December last year is tragic enough.