Best, worst

PINOY KASI
Best, worst

By Michael Tan
Inquirer
Last updated 01:27am (Mla time) 10/11/2006

Published on Page A13 of the October 11, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

A FEW years back, the University of the Philippines (UP) went into a frenzy after Asiaweek magazine released its survey results ranking Asia’s best universities. UP had ranked 32nd in the 1999 ratings, but in 2000 it dropped to 48th, still the Philippines’ best but closer to the ranks of three upstart universities: De La Salle was 71st, Ateneo de Manila 72nd and University of Santo Tomas 78th.

The UP president at that time, Dr. Francisco Nemenzo, he used the figures to good effect, lobbying for a bigger government budget and introducing all kinds of initiatives and incentives to get faculty members and students to maintain the university’s excellence.

Sadly, Asiaweek had to fold up, and the 2000 ratings became the last. The ratings could have come in handy for UP’s current president, Dr. Emerlinda Roman, who has continued the previous administration’s incentives but still has to fight an uphill battle at Congress to get UP more money.

I went back to those Asiaweek rankings over the weekend because I felt there were still lessons to pick up from them. Rather than just comparing ourselves to other Philippine universities, we should be looking at the bigger regional picture, asking what’s behind the best of the universities.

Leaders

Asiaweek’s 2000 survey had the following top 10 multidisciplinary universities (defined as offering a wide range of degree programs “from arts to business to engineering”): Kyoto University, Tohuku University, University of Hong Kong, Seoul National University, National University of Singapore, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Australian National University, University of Melbourne and University of New South Wales.

A first look suggests these universities lead because they are all based in richer countries: Japan, Australia, South Korea and China’s Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong.

It’s a good point, but I want you to note as well that except for the Hong Kong universities, all the top 10 institutions are run by government. Also, I did some research and found that even Hong Kong’s private universities are heavily subsidized by the government.

Asiaweek’s complete list of multidisciplinary universities had 77 institutions, the majority of which were state-run. Moreover, state universities generally were at the top of the list for each country. For example, Thailand had five universities listed, all state-run and coming from different Thai provinces. In contrast, for the Philippines, we had four universities, all Metro Manila-based, with UP leading, followed by three private universities.

Asiaweek had a separate listing for leading science and technology universities. The top 10 were Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, IIT Delhi, IIT Madras, Tokyo Institute of Technology, IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), and Taiwan University of Science and Technology.

Here we find that except for South Korea’s Pohang University and Singapore’s Nanyang, all the leading institutes are state-run. Not only that, we find India, a country poorer than the Philippines, dominating with their IIT units from all over the country.

Failed model

Why are we where we are today? In the 1960s about 25 percent of our national budget went into education, with neighboring countries sending their scholars to train with us. But starting with the Ferdinand Marcos era, the budget began to go more toward debt servicing. We also began to loosen the Department of Education’s supervision of tertiary education, allowing more diploma mills to emerge as long as they catered to the international labor market.

In contrast, countries like Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea continued to invest heavily in state-run institutions, in areas that they knew would be important in the long term, for example, electronics and biotechnology.

With so many success models around us, we insist on following a failed model, that of the United States, which looks at social services as best left to the “free” market, responding to current market demands and minimal state involvement in education, whether through funding for universities or the setting of standards and regulations.

Reacting to my column, one reader sent in an angry letter last week asking why I can’t seem to find anything good in America and pointing out that the United States has many government-funded universities and community colleges.

That reader missed my point. The United States does have public universities, but its educational system is mainly driven by free enterprise. A federal Department of Education has minimal supervisory powers; accreditation is left to state and local school boards. There are public universities but funding, as that reader points out, comes from state funds, which is well and good if you live in a rich state, and sorry if you come from a poor one.

How do the public and private universities fare? The US News and World Report’s latest report, based on peer ratings, has the following at the top of the list: Princeton, Harvard, Yale, California Institute of Technology, Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Duke University, Dartmouth, Columbia.

Those familiar with the American system would have picked up on the pattern: all the ones that have been named are private universities, all charging very high tuition fees.

The highest-ranking public university listed was the University of California-Berkeley, which ranked 21st.

Catching up

All the leading capitalist countries in the world, except for the United States, were founded on a strong social welfare system, meaning money put into social services to give a fighting chance to those who have less in life.

Even neighboring Singapore, often looked at as the most capitalist of Southeast Asian countries, has always kept education and health a primary government concern, seeing these services as an investment in the future. It’s not surprising that the National University of Singapore (NUS) is now rated among the world’s best, and that Asia’s elite fly off to the NUS General Hospital (the equivalent of our Philippine General Hospital) for state-of-the art medical care.

And the Philippines? Last week, there was a near-stampede at the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) as thousands of Filipinos jostled to get permits to take a Korean language proficiency exam, a requirement to work in South Korea’s factories. In a few years, we just might have similar crowds of Filipinos trying to get a job in China and India, with many turned away because they graduated from a neighborhood diploma mill operating out of some mall.

I do see a place for private sector involvement in education, and will explain this in another column. Meanwhile, we must stop trying to be more American than the Americans. Knowing what’s best in education, why must we insist on pursuing a course that threatens to make us the worst in the region?