Manila Times: The country needs more professionals
BY SHARLENE VALENCIA RESEARCHER
The Philippines should produce more professionals, not more laborers.
The suggestion came on Thursday from Adel Tamano during a roundtable with editors and reporters of The Manila Times.
Tamano, a former president of the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila (PLM) and now senatorial candidate of the Nacionalista Party in the May 2010 elections, noted that the government seems to prefer turning out bartenders, plumbers and welders than doctors, engineers and scientists even in an increasingly competitive global village.
Such apparent bias, according to him, shows in a budget shift from the Commission on Higher Education (Ched) to the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda).
“It is an expensive investment but in the long run it will pay off,” Tamano said of his proposal for education authorities to rethink their priorities, not the least the apparent favoring of blue-collar workers.
The former PLM president, himself an educator for 17 years, also suggested that local colleges and universities be weaned from Ched, partly because the commission “has different issues from the LCUs [local colleges and universities].”
Tamano, a lawyer, made the proposal because the local colleges and universities “do not want [anymore] to get a percentage from the pie of the Department of Education because [the department] has enough problems of its own to deal with.”
The LCUs, he said, “do not get any [direct] state funding.”
The government puts up state colleges and universities but falls short in subsidizing them. To make up for the apparent failure, it has created the LCUs.