No Graduation,
No Jobs for Poor Filipino Students
April is the time for
the graduation of students in the elementary, high school and college
levels. There is happiness in the faces of both parents and students when
the latter receive their diplomas. Is this feeling shared by majority of
Filipinos, or do most of the youth have are forced to do other things than
study?
BY CARL MARC RAMOTA
Bulatlat
Public schools offer free tuition for
elementary and high school students. This may account for high enrollment
there, but the failure of most students to graduate could be explained by
analyzing situation of the country’s educational system.
In school year
2003-2004, total high school enrolment was pegged at 6,270,208, of which
80 percent were in public high schools. And out of the 12,982,349
elementary students enrolled, almost 93 percent (12,061,675) studied in
public schools.
While participation rates in elementary
and high school may be increasing, data on the rates of completion,
survival, dropout and retention are not showing substantial improvements.
The dropout rate, in fact, is increasing.
End of the road
China de Vera, 16, is a senior student at
Quirino High School in Quezon City and chair of the high school chapter of
the League of Filipino Students (LFS). She will be graduating next month.
Instead of being excited about her
graduation, de Vera feared that she and most of her batchmates may not be
able to enter college. “Only a few are given (that) opportunity. For most
us, high school graduation marks the end of our days in school.”
Her views reflect the
signs of the times. Out of the six million students who were able to enter
high school, only 2.4 million or 60 percent entered college in 2002-2004.
While graduation rate among high school students was pegged at 90.62
percent in that year, cohort survival rate from 1st year to 4th
year college was only 63.88 percent. Completion rate was even lower - only
58.62 percent.
Cohort survival is
computed by determining the number of entrants and then knowing how many
of them entered the last level of education. Completion rate, on the other
hand, refers to the percentage of students who graduated from an
educational level.
De Vera said that
public high school students like her who decide to go to college have no
other option but to enroll in state universities and colleges (SUCs) where
tuition is relatively low compared to private schools. Unfortunately, only
a few are admitted due to the SUCs’ high cut-off mark and limited slots.
The massive cuts in the SUC budget and
rationalization policy of the Arroyo administration have already forced
the closure or merger of several SUCs. From 271 in 1996, there were only
173 SUCs left by 2002.
“It is therefore not
surprising why most high school students just stop schooling after
graduation and start working. Unfortunately, there are also no available
jobs so most of us end up unemployed, or engage in anti-social activities
like drugs and prostitution,” she said.
Ironically, those
enrolled in tertiary schools are also having a hard time finishing it.
Data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (Unesco)-National Commission in the
Philippines
showed that the cohort survival rate from first to fourth year college was
only 22 percent. College dropout rate, on the other hand, was pegged at 73
percent.
Venancio Cabugos, 23,
is an irregular political science major at Adamson University in Manila.
He had to take on two part-time jobs to support his education. He earns a
living through commissions received from selling tickets for a theater
group and arranging educational tours for a travel agency. Previously, he
worked as a waiter in a bar in Malate.
He admitted that he
had to reduce his academic load and skip classes because of his part-time
jobs. “Sometimes, I go directly to class from a field trip without sleep.
I cannot afford to give up my jobs since I have to raise at least P13,000
($238.66, based on an exchange rate of P54.47 per U.S. dollar) for my
tuition alone every semester. Aside from that, there are a lot of things
that you need to pay to live here in Manila,” he said in Filipino.
The same was true for Alpha Carole
Pontalan, a sophomore student at the University of the Philippines’
College of Law
who filed a leave of absence this semester and now works for a call center.
She said she had to stop schooling for a while to support her family in
Bicol and save for her future expenses in law school.
The drop-out race
A study by the National Youth Commission (NYC)
in 1997 revealed that one in four barangays has no elementary
schools, depriving some 1.6 million children of basic education. A third
of the country’s barangays do not even have complete elementary
schools, making primary education still inaccessible.
The average elementary cohort survival
rate for the Philippines was 68.6 percent in 1997.
This means that out of a hundred who enter
Grade I, only 68 of them normally finish Grade VI.
Survival rate in high school also showed a
slight decline, from 74.7 percent in 1983-1984 to 73.3 percent in
1995-1996. This rate indicates that roughly a quarter of first year high
school students do not reach the fourth year level.
The Functional Literacy and Exposure to
Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) conducted by the National Statistics Office (NSO)
in 1994 provided the following reasons why these students did not go to
school: lack of personal interest; housekeeping; and the high cost of
education.
A
similar survey made by the NSO on working children in 2001 stressed that
the main reason given for dropping out of school was the loss of interest
of the child in going to school, which accounted for 31 percent of total
respondents. Others complained that they could not afford to go to school
because of high cost of schooling (28 percent).
De Vera added that many students are
discouraged to study also because of the condition of schools. “Who will
be encouraged to study if there are more than 60 students cramped in a
single classroom? You cannot blame them for not going to school if they
don’t even have a chair and a textbook. Worse, most do not even have a
classroom and there are some schools where only one teacher teaches grade
one to three all at the same time.”
Data from the Alliance of
Concerned Teachers (ACT) showed that in the last school year, the country
was short of 39,383 classrooms, 4,125,413 seats, 9.88 million textbooks
and some 49,212 teachers.
Out of school
Many Filipino youth had to work at an
early age to help augment the family income, sacrificing their education
in the process. Worse, a lot of these working children have not even
entered school.
Results of the 2002 Annual Poverty
Indicators Survey (APIS) showed that the total number of out-of-school
Filipino youth were 14.7 percent or 4.84 million out of 32.96 million
population aged 6 to 24 years.
Mark Ferdinand Rosello, 17, is one of the
many out-of school youth in the country. The youngest among four children,
he wanted to take up Fine Arts to become a painter. However, he had to
stop studying after his father died in 1999. He was only in his first year
in high school.
He ended up doing silkscreen painting to
earn a living. He was also among the street children along Quezon Avenue
who sold newspapers or rags to motorists.
Rosello admitted that he is envious of
batch mates who will be graduating this year. Like him, many Filipino
children and youth had to stop studying and work to earn a living.
In 2001, the Philippine
census showed that four million or 16.2 percent of children aged 5-17
years old were already economically active. This percentage was slightly
higher than the 3.6 million economically active children reported in 1995.
Of these children, about 40 percent were elementary undergraduate and
another 32 percent had reached high school.
Thirty
seven percent of these children did their job on a seasonal basis or only
during school vacation. However, the same study also showed that a third
of these children never attended school.
Majority of these children worked as laborers and unskilled workers (2.6
million or 65 percent). Others worked as service workers and shop and
market sales workers (544,000 or 13.5 percent) and as farmers, forestry
workers and fishermen (454,000 or 11.3 percent).
Indeed, the increasing number of dropouts
and out-of-school youth negate government claims that education is
accessible and affordable to majority of Filipinos. This trend is expected
to continue unless reforms in the educational system are made that will
create an atmosphere that is conducive for education. Bulatlat
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