PHILIPPINE-BASED conglomerate Phinma Corp. facilitated "Private Education Toward Nation Building," a policy forum powered by its educational arm, Phinma Education.
Through presentations by Kavita Rajagopalan, program director of Global Schools Forum (GSF) and Meekyung Shin, education specialist for higher education at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the forum steered and encouraged discussion on the way private tertiary education institutions could complement public education in the Philippines, as a response to the current educational crisis in the country.
Held at The Fifth at Rockwell, Makati, the forum drew over 150 education leaders and stakeholders, including heads of the Philippine Association of Colleges and Universities (PACU), Philippine Business for Education (PBEd), Private Education Assistance Committee (PEAC) and Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines (CEAP).
"While the public sector's education spending per person in the country has grown robustly over the past 25 years, we continue to perform poorly in international standardized student assessments. This is a clear indicator that we have much to do and increasingly little time to do it," Phinma Corp. Chairman and CEO Ramon del Rosario Jr. said.
Phinma Education President and CEO Chito Salazar also emphasized that "there should be complementarity between the private and public sectors, where the private sector can offer education services that normally come from public schools."
"This is so the government will not need to build or produce new schools. The public and private sectors need to work together to really maximize our efforts, facilities and resources to solve the learning crisis," he said.
A 2021 study by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) revealed that education spending per person had increased over the last 25 years, with educational expenditures increasing by about 6.4 percent annually within the last 15 years alone. This surpassed the growth in per capita income.
Filipino households bear the brunt of these expenses, contributing to the nation's poor performance in international standardized student assessments.
In the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Philippines ranked lowest among 79 participating countries in reading comprehension, and second lowest in both mathematical and scientific literacy.
To help fill this gap, Rajagopalan noted the importance of foundational education –nor teaching the basic literacy, numeracy and transferable skills to schoolchildren – in the Philippine context.
Shin also noted that almost all developing countries in the Asia and Pacific are middle income countries, which means that they face surplus in lower level skills and big shortages in higher level skills.
"As successful countries like Korea and Japan have shown, private education plays a critical complementary role in improving access, quality and relevance of higher education," Shin said.
