Page 7 - JICE Volume 7 Isssue 1 2018

Education in thE ‘nEw SociEty’ and thE PhiliPPinE labour ExPort Policy (1972-1986)
Educational Development

A continuing dependency on the US and oligarchical control of the economy resulted in conflicting
development strategies by a succession of pre-Marcos governments. The impact of this on the
expansion of education, as elucidated below, was further compounded by chronic budget deficits
associated with the growing public school sector. This hobbled the education system, making it
difficult for the state to address increasing demand beyond elementary schooling. The task then
fell to the private sector dominated by Catholic schools (now ultimately accountable to American
rather than Spanish chapters), joined by newly arrived Protestant missionaries and a few enterprising
returned pensionados from oligarchic families. The general absence of a centralized, state-directed
educational expansion, along with a generally laissez-faire attitude towards the education sector,
meant that the law of supply and demand prevailed as Gonzalez (1989) further noted. However,
supply was actually controlled by the profit-seeking private institutions, which created programs
designed to yield high return on minimal investment. The unhampered proliferation of programs
in the liberal arts, education, and business courses evoked another wave of ‘mass education’
reminiscent of the early decades of American colonization, but this time in higher education.
In an earlier study, I discuss how the Philippine state, unlike those of the East Asian tigers,
did not adopt a sequential approach to developing the system during the post-war period; in other
words, tertiary education was rapidly expanded before elementary and secondary education had
been universalized and subjected to rigorous standardisation (Maca and Morris, 2012). Carnoy
(1974) viewed this pattern as problematic for a largely agriculture-based developing country like
the Philippines,which had yet to achieve industrialization – generally seen as a prerequisite for the

competitiveness of an emerging economy in the global capitalist system. With college education
deemed as critical social capital by majority of Filipino families, the heightened demand reinforced
the monopolistic behavior of the private education sector. The absence of government regulation and
a conscious strategy to match manpower needs of new economic programs resulted to disastrous
result of, paradoxically, overeducation in non-technical fields on one hand and continued lack of
skilled technicians and engineers for the manufacturing industries.
This education-industry mismatch further deteriorated with the import substitution industry
stagnating by the early 1960s. With the domestic labour market unable to absorb the products of
an expanded higher education system, the ‘graduate unemployment’ phenomenon first noticed
in India began to cause alarm (Gonzalez, 1989).The rapid growth of the private market for tertiary
education was being blamed for the failure of the government to ‘regulate’ the sector. Table 1 below
shows the rapid progress of privatization in the Philippine higher education system, making it one
of the most highly privatized in the world (Gulosino, 2003). Marcos made a few attempts to reign
over this sector as discussed below.

Table 1. Tertiary School Enrollment by Public Versus Private Institutions, 1946-1985
Institutions Enrollments *
Year Public Private Total % Private Public Private Total
1946 5 498 503 99 1 45 46
1955 26 351 377 93 7 177 184
1965 26 440 466 94 59 468 527
1975 126 628 754 83 106 660 766
1985 319 838 1,157 72 230 1,274 1504

Source: Data from Philippine Statistical Yearbooks and Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission adapted from Ruiz
(2014) p. 101
*Data for 1946 in 10,000 and from 1955-85 in 100,000

Journal of International and Comparative Education, 2018, Volume 7, Issue 1 3