Struggling to measure up as competition toughens

The 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics is set to formally open today with no spectators, a first in the game’s modern history. As Japan is experiencing a surge in coronavirus infections, the International Olympics Committee (IOC) has issued corresponding biosecurity preparations to protect the health of participating athletes from 205 countries.

Pressure had been mounting in recent weeks to postpone once again the games, but with the IOC decision to stick to the new schedule this year of July 23 to Aug. 8, the opening parade and the last leg of the torch relay will take place at the Japan National Stadium in Tokyo tomorrow.

Many cities that have hosted past games have experienced financial challenges in the process of building the necessary facilities and infrastructure for the hundreds of sporting events. For Tokyo, despite extensive cost downgrades, the mere postponement of the games by one year had been estimated at over $5 billion, and the act of barring spectators would surely add more.

Cancelling the 2020 Olympics has never been an easy option, as it would have cost Japan an outright loss of $41.2 billion, besides the tricky negotiations that would ensue in settling losses incurred by other stakeholders from local organizers, sponsors, hospitality firms, and travel providers.

Aside from this, though, it is the lost opportunity for many athletes to compete in the games that they had laboriously trained for, which for many had started when competing in local competitions as youngsters.

The Philippine contingent this year continues to be a lean one, but not the smallest since its debut in 1924. Nineteen Filipino athletes, 10 women and nine men, will represent the country in 11 sporting events. The quest for an elusive gold medal continues. We wish our athletes the very best.

Tougher demand on higher education

A harsher competitive arena on the global stage that is ongoing is with higher education; and like with the Olympics, Philippine universities are struggling to measure up to par with the best, as gleaned from the latest Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) world university rankings.

In fact, the best we have, being the state-led University of the Philippines Diliman (UPD) in Quezon City, has managed to land only at the 396th place according to the 2021 published QS Ranking. In the previous year, UPD was at 356.

(Three other universities, all privately run, have taken a spot below the top 500 ranks: Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University, and University of Sto. Tomas.)

It’s not that the UPD may have slipped in delivering quality education, but rather because of the marked improvement of other universities in other countries, many of them making their first appearance in the list of the top 200.

While medal performances in the Olympics are defined by incremental improvements, like fraction of seconds or millimeters, higher education’s measurements are exploding in numbers like never before as demands of the real world get tougher.

Phil Baty, chief knowledge officer of the Times Higher Education, cites the “battle of ideas for leadership of the Fourth Industrial Revolution fueled by investment in Artificial Intelligence, materials and biotechnology” as reason for the competitive spurt in the global knowledge economy.

Universities that have invested heavily in research are reaping recognition as being exemplary learning institutions that are able to equip their graduates with the qualities that make them desirable employees in the world’s top-notch companies.

Better education, better opportunities

For a nation that relies on its overseas working countrymen to send foreign currency earnings to support their families, education has never before become so important. Unfortunately, though, our best graduates often find themselves relegated to low-level jobs.

Very few Filipinos land in top management positions of companies based abroad, and most of them will have earned their degrees in – or a string of degrees from – top universities abroad.

Many overseas working Filipinos recognize the deficiencies of our educational system, and graduating even from UPD or any of the other country’s top schools like the Ateneo or De La Salle is no guarantee to getting a high paying job in a developed economy.

Still, we persist in sending our better graduates overseas because the compensation package is far better than if they would have secured a local job. At the back of the mind of most Filipinos working for foreign masters, a better education would have opened them better opportunities.

Wanted: better leadership

The deteriorating quality of most of our higher education colleges and universities has remained unchecked, this despite the continuing rise in tuition fees charged by many privately held learning institutions.

Higher education has also become so commercialized that we have too many colleges and universities that offer courses that do not promise the jobs for which graduates have trained. This has not only led to the current skills-job mismatch, but also in the graduates’ low level of appreciation and understanding of science-related skills, and inadequacy in analytical and innovation abilities.

For the millions of students who have gone through the sub-standard quality of basic education, the government’s mandated free tuition fees in state-owned universities and colleges are often out of reach after failing competitive entrance exams.

The Commission of Higher Education (CHeD) has plenty of room to step up, and it would immensely help if this bureaucratic arm of the country’s education system would show better leadership in improving the quality of our higher learning.

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