At last, some hope for CHEd
Ate Glue is finally doing something about the mess at CHEd. One wonders why it took Ate Glue so long to do anything at all. It was so obvious that something horrible is going on there with all the diploma mills, specially in nursing, going strong. I was wondering what political hold the chairman of CHEd had on Ate Glue.
When The Philippine Star Business section team had a rare opportunity to interview Ate Glue some weeks ago, I pointed out this glaring problem of diploma mills proliferating particularly in the nursing field and Ate Glue was not only attentive but seemed very much concerned about it as well. She said she was going to do something about it and I responded that this is one instance when her tendency to micromanage is called for.
Romy Neri was present in that meeting but I never guessed that Ate Glue would tap Romy to troubleshoot CHEd. Romy is probably just the guy to carry out Ate Glue’s CHEd clean-up operation. I can hardly be described as an admirer of Romy but I think he is at least squeaky clean.
His marching order is pretty specific: make college education more relevant to jobs after graduation. It is about time that government really did something to address the problem of jobless college graduates in the face of unfilled vacancies in local businesses.
As I told Ate Glue during our interview, it is so unfair for poor parents whose children end up as students in diploma mills. They beg and borrow for tuition money in the hope that their child will be a nurse or an accountant or whatever… only to find out after the child’s graduation that the child is unemployable because the diploma mill didn’t really impart any useful skill.
Putting the problem of diploma mills in nursing aside, there is also the matter of career counseling that our young people should be given. So many of our youth end up taking courses that are not likely to open up a bright future for them… like mass communication. CHEd should have moved in a long time ago to stop the diploma mills from offering these courses which happen to be profitable but useless.
Given our lingering unemployment problem, I can understand Ate Glue’s anxiety over CHEd’s inability to match courses with jobs and improve the quality of graduates. The proposal of Labor Secretary Brion to also license those who fail the nursing licensure examination as “practical nurses” is a good illustration of how desperate the situation is. Brion was worried by the certainty that half of the 78,000 or so who take the nursing tests are going to flunk. How could close to 40,000 nursing graduates have diplomas from CHEd certified schools yet unable to pass government’s licensure exams? This makes nursing education here a racket, plain and simple.
Of course the Philippine Nursing Association was horrified with Secretary Brion’s proposal. Creating a substrata of nursing professionals composed of flunkers would hurt the international image for Philippine nurses and we can’t afford that... given their contribution to OFW remittances. But Secretary Brion was worried about the flunkers bloating the ranks of the unemployed and unemployables.
If CHEd did its work by closing down more than half of all nursing schools a long time ago, we wouldn’t have this mess. We have more than 400 nursing schools accredited by CHEd and growing as fast as hot pandesal stalls in the past. A total of 632,108 students enrolled for school year 2007-2008, up 145,875 or 30 percent from the 486,233 enlisted last year. Nursing schools that are unable to claim even a single graduate passing the licensure tests should be closed down.
So Romy Neri has a well defined job to do at CHEd. It helps that Romy has direct access to Ate Glue. Close coordination with DepEd and TESDA will be required in Romy’s new job. But I don’t see how Romy can get his job done in six months as he had announced. Then again, that tight self-imposed deadline should get him moving fast.
Ate Glue now has a high powered team in Education. Hopefully, they will be able to work out well with each other. The problem with these high profile and politically savvy personalities is that their egos could get in the way. And it didn’t help that some people started calling Romy Neri the education czar. Neither Jesli nor Buboy Syjuco would appreciate that. The only education czar I see is Ate Glue herself and it looks like she will micromanage this as we urged her to during our interview. And that’s good.
Mailbox
Just got this e-mail from a reader.
Please keep this anonymous.
I have read your article on the PIPC scandal. In hindsight, you are correct. Nobody should have trusted unqualified people with their money. The lure of high returns can dull one’s judgment. Cristina Gonzalez-Tuason and her crew were not only unqualified (a concern I had and should have acted on earlier), they were flashy and arrogant too.
Our recent investor meeting was a disaster, with Gonzalez-Tuason refusing to answer questions. She made a smart move (“reporting” the situation to the NBI); probably under the advice of her slick lawyer brother. But some facts are emerging about her: houses in
This is not a question of her incompetence. While she is unqualified to begin with as a financial adviser (with no credentials to speak of), she is one street smart lady. She’s as brash as they get. And her snooty network of “agents” all fit the same profile.
Thank you.
BC comment: PIPC had been around for quite a while now… about ten years. Investors had a lot of time to evaluate the nature of their investment and the competence of the people handling it. For so long as they were receiving their interest earnings, no one complained about anyone being snooty or unqualified to act as financial advisers or having children in IS and houses abroad.
The fact remains that many investors didn’t know the first thing about how to make money playing with derivatives and foreign exchange. And I guess many, if not all, investors knew they were playing in an arena largely beyond the regulatory reach of the Philippine government. There may even have been some thoughts on avoiding taxes with this kind of arrangement (the BIR may want to ask her a few questions about this... at the very least she should have withheld taxes on income). Ironically, even as they didn’t plan on paying taxes, they are now asking the government to help them recover their investments.
Let us just hope a lot of people learned a very expensive lesson here: know what you are investing in and investigate the people you are entrusting your money to. And perish any thoughts of Congress passing a new law to regulate such schemes. No law can be made to protect the greedy and the dumb.
Smart Parenting
Marilyn Mana-ay Robles and a few other readers passed on this one.
Isang ina buhat sa probinsiya ang sumulat sa kanyang anak ng ganito....
Dear Anak,
Naipadala ko na ang Php50,000.00 na pang tuition mo. Ipinagbili namin yung kalabaw natin. Napakamahal naman pala ng kurso mong iyan na Counter-Strike...
Wala na rin pala tayong mga baboy kasi kasama silang ipinagbili namin para naman sa sinasabi mong project sa school, Nokia N-75 ba yun? Ang mahal naman din ng project ninyong yan!
Dun mo na lang kunin sa padala naming pera yung Php7000.00 para sa field trip ninyo sa Mall of
Isasanla din namin yung palayan para mabili mo na yung instrumentong i-Pod.
Nga pala... napa-ilaw ba ninyo yung pinagpuyatan ninyong SanMig Lights?
Nagmamahal,
Inay
Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]
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