Education is considered as a way to enhance the nation’s economic integrity. According to the International Trends in Higher Education 2015, education has long been seen as a crucial tool for national development. Making education more reachable and accessible to many Filipinos is a framework for improving the nation’s human capital. However, a lot of Filipino families simply cannot afford to send their children to college or university due to financial difficulties. Senator Gatchalian, in his introductory note in his introduction of House Bill No. 5905, cited that half of the population of college-age youngsters in the country were unable to pursue tertiary education due to economic reason or need to work to support their family (2013 Annual Poverty and Indicator Survey).  Creating a move to realize this, in the report of Mateo (2016), a comprehensive Free Public Education Law has been passed to remove the burden of paying tuition and other fees to colleges and universities.  The drive to bring state universities and colleges to more Filipinos must lead to an increased focus on the quality of its graduates and their job readiness to realize the end of achieving national capacity and economic competitiveness.

Another batch of graduates will soon receive their respective diplomas as another academic year is about to end. After passing all the requirements of various related courses, after so many laborious nights, relentless nights and unbounded personal and academic and personal struggles, senior students are looking forward to an event that would culminate all their sacrifices- their graduation. Literally, senior students are “grad-waiting”.

But what lies ahead after graduation? Graduates may experience difficulty in finding a job since It is not automatic that they would land into relevant jobs so easily. A related job may be illusive to some due to definite reasons. According to the results of the Labor Force Survey2015  commissioned by the Institute for Labor Studies of the Department of Labor of Employment, youth composes half (50.4%) of 2.592 million unemployed population in the Philippines. It is worth mentioning that a considerable part of the unemployed population consists of 0.960 million Filipino youths who have graduated from college or about. Moreover, according to the January 2014 Labor Force Survey, the Philippines registered an unemployment rate of 7.5 percent, while underemployment was pegged at 19.5 percent. Likewise, The Global Employment Trends report of the International Labor Organization published in 2014 also revealed that the Philippines registered an unemployment rate of 7.3 percent in 2013, the highest unemployment rate among members the Association of South East Asian Nations or ASEAN.

            Causing the growing unemployed and underemployed Filipinos is the job-skill mismatch crisis. Uy (2016) has cited in his column the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines report that about 1.2 million college and vocation graduates this year (2016) will struggle getting a job due to growing mismatch between their training and job skills required by most employers both at national and global scale.
            The aforementioned data posed challenges for colleges and universities as they are expected to regularly evaluate the relevance of their programs to the community. Tracing their graduates and how they are performing in the field of work should be initiated by higher education institutions (HEIs). This means that HEIs’ measures of outcomes should not end as the graduates finished their schooling, they should consider more vital measures of their outcomes by examining their graduates’ skills in passing both the board examination and entry requirements for a job. HEIs should, at the same time, examine their graduates’ successes in their professional practice, professional recognition and achievement so that HEIs’ vision and mission of providing quality education through relevant programs may be realized.

            So to the grad-waiting students, life will be more challenging after graduation. Enjoy the moment of your graduation for now. Dream big! Happy job hunting!

By: Gng. Sandee C. Olubia | Teacher III | Bataan National High School |Balanga, Bataan