Gearing up for 2016 and 2018

By the looks of it, the year 2016 is going to be a banner year for the Philippines. In January that year, some 10,000 Roman Catholic clergy and lay leaders from all over the world will spend seven days of their lives in Cebu for the 51st International Eucharistic Congress. This is only the second time that the Philippines hosts this gathering of minds that, like the Olympics, happens only once every four years. The last time the country hosted the event was in 1937 when it was not even a country yet.

Four months after, the country will see what is probably the most boring elections in its history. That is, if the people’s campaign for President Benigno Aquino III to scrap the pork barrel from both the legislative and the executive branches will triumph. The elections that year will probably see no one running for the House of Representatives and the Senate and even the presidency.

These two events alone will have lasting impact in the way this nation will be seen by the world thereafter.

Ah, but there is a third one that will also rock the Philippines and bring in a sea-change in the way it has educated its young. In June 2016, collegiate education will come to a screeching stop for most if not all as we finally join the world in providing 12 years of pre-baccalaureate education with the addition of two more years to the four-year high school program that we know of.

Already, schools are preparing for this radical transition. The signing last Monday, for example, by the Marie Ernestine Schools with the Cebu Doctors University is one attempt at gearing up for the inevitable. Colleges with no basic education divisions, like Velez College, for example, are now preparing their faculty for the probable reality of empty classrooms as the incoming freshmen are still down there at Grade 11 in other schools. Or, like CDU, they can partner with a basic education school like Marie Ernestine.

At the University of San Carlos, preparations have been going on since three years back with the investiture of a no-nonsense president, Fr. Dionisio M. Miranda, SVD. Even its basic education divisions are now near-autonomous, assigned a director in the person of Fr. Felino Javines, Jr., SVD who has overseen not just the physical transformation of USC’s two basic education campuses (the North Campus and the South Campus), adding new classrooms, but also anticipating the massive curricular alterations as much of the first two years of college education courses will become Grade 11 and 12 subjects or will disappear forever. Even the terminologies have changed. You no longer hear of first year high school students there; they are now called Grade 7 students.

Seizing the opportunity to institute much-needed changes, the Commission on Higher Education (Ched) issued Commission Memorandum Order no. 46 or CMO 46, a very thick and lengthy blueprint for creating new standards in higher education for the Philippines. Both public and private colleges and universities are now being asked to choose from a vertical and a horizontal set of typologies and to work their way between now and 2018 to prove that they deserve to be in that set. At the vertical typological level, one can insist either full autonomy (now enjoyed by only 22 universities in the country) or a lower status like de-regulated or regulated. At the horizontal level, they can choose to be a university, an institute or a professional school. A set of standards and requisites accompany each typology. Today’s universities, if they so desire to be called one, will now have to prove their worth and not just in terms of board exam passing, private accreditation and the like.

At USC, two colleges, the College of Engineering and the School of Business and Economics (there is no College of Commerce anymore), are gearing up for accreditation under two international agreements: the Washington Accords, which sets standards for engineering schools and the Bologna Accords which cover those of business schools and the like. In the Philippines, only the Mapua Institute of Technology is recognized internationally as meeting the Washington standards. I am not aware as yet of any Philippine school passing the Bologna standards yet.

The preparations at USC following CMO 46 and other related instruments have been continuing in a pace that will, fingers crossed, see it through by 2018 as still an autonomous university. Last Monday, Dr. Elizabeth Remedio, appointed recently as the university’s Curriculum Development Officer, gathered hundreds of faculty members and administrative employees in a day-long seminar on Outcome-Based Education (OBE), Constructive Alignment (CA) and Quality Assurance (QA). The seminar came amid the conversion of the college curricula along OBE lines (termed Obedization) that were carried out last year. Even its two scholarly publications, “The Philippine Scientist” and “The Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society” have not been left unchanged as they are now applying for international accreditation via “Web of Science” and “Scopus.” All these and much more as the university gears up for 2018.

I assume that other colleges and universities are also doing the same. Otherwise, they shall perish come 2018.