The ongoing reframing of higher education is stirring much controversy. Education planners are focusing on the question whether to invest in so-called human capital for economic competitiveness or to develop a wholesome citizen. But this an overstated tension.
It is becoming more apparent that the purpose of reframing is to respond to the evolving demands of the global labor market, particularly the need for a workforce equipped for artificial intelligence (AI) and other rapidly advancing digital technologies. The recently concluded Luzon Economic Corridor (LEC) Investment Forum emphasized this – that higher education should ensure the core competencies needed for Pax Silica.
At the end of the day, reframing continues to be hinged on the same market-driven criteria of employability of graduates and agility of higher education institutions to adapt to ever-changing business needs. The pressure is unfairly placed on schools to produce whatever skills the global market requires, while the Philippine economy itself goes wherever the global market takes it.
Youth jobs crisis
The result is a jobs crisis that is particularly severe for the youth. More and more young people, aged 15-24 years, are seeking work but are unable to find jobs. The latest youth unemployment stands at 18.6% – more than three times the reported 6% overall.
About 96% or 1.3 million of the unemployed youth are not in employment, education or training (NEET). Another 2 million NEET youth are outside the labor force, bringing the total number of young people neither working nor studying or training to around 3.3 million. The sheer number points to a problem far more structural than the usual job-skills mismatch long posited by government planners.
The youth account for more than a third (36%) of the country’s unemployed. This should be a concern not only for higher education institutions and curriculum planners, but even more so for economic development planners. This goes beyond whether young people are acquiring the right skills to whether the economy is creating decent and productive jobs.
What employability?
Among the youth labor force, 9.9 million have educational attainment of junior high school (JHS) or lower, while 10.2 million are senior high school (SHS) graduates or have higher educational attainment. Among the employed youth, 3 million are JHS or lower level graduates, while 2.5 million are SHS or higher level graduates. Among the total employed, those with educational attainment of JHS or lower number 30.3 million, while those with SHS or higher are just 18.5 million.
Has the K-12 grade system succeeded then in making JHS graduates employable? It is safe to say that today’s youth would rather stop schooling and look for work, even if there are few jobs to be had.
Among the unemployed youth, 41% are college and senior high school graduates, revealing further that higher education has produced a hardly employable labor force.
It’s the failing economy
Agriculture remains the single largest employer of workers with JHS education or less, followed by wholesale and retail trade. In the neoliberal economy, both sectors are characterized by low wages, widespread informality, weak labor protection, and precarious work—conditions that also help explain persistently high underemployment. As educational attainment rises, wholesale and retail trade overtakes agriculture as the leading employer, but the quality of employment improves little.
This reflects a deeper structural problem: the economy’s weak industrial base limits the creation of stable, productive, and better-paying jobs that can absorb an increasingly educated workforce.
The economy’s capacity to absorb fresh graduates is the main question—not whether higher education is failing, not whether investment in reskilling is not enough and cannot keep pace with technological changes. It is the economy that is failing, for where else should the education curriculum be anchored if not in a coherent national economic development plan?
In the end, it is the State itself. It does not have a clear industrial policy, nor a serious national industrialization plan on which desired learning competencies may be based. Instead, the youth’s employability is largely being tethered to a foreign-investment strategy that assumes jobs will follow once investors come in. The lack of genuine economic development planning is the one failing the youth.
Serving national goals
The question on whether the more important end of higher education should be the formation of citizens or employability is a false dichotomy that has only been sharpened by neoliberal policies. For instance, an electrical engineering graduate who had been taught a sense of nationhood and social service and enters a privatized electricity company would be conflicted as to why an essential public utility has been privatized.
This is not a failure of the two goals of higher education, for both ends—graduating socially concerned citizens and are ready for higher technologies that are aimed at transforming the economy and the lives of the majority—should be integrated in learning. Higher education should be reframed to develop critical thinking and positive values that serve national goals.
But the Marcos Jr government is pushing for an education reframing that will serve the US economic agenda of gaining technological domination in the AI global supply chain. But who will teach these skills? Pax Silica will require advanced technological skills that have been learned and developed over many years and generations—skills that none of the current Filipino teachers have been trained in.
Why chase other countries’ agenda, when there is a whole failing economy to develop? Reframing will end when true education begins.
