How do you feel about earning your bachelor’s degree in less than four years? If Department of Trade and Industry Secretary Alfredo Pascual were to have his way, this could be the case as he has called to shorten the time students need to earn a college degree.
Pascual expressed this sentiment at a national employers’ conference organized by the Employers Confederation of the Philippines on Wednesday, The Philippine Star reported.
“The trend now in higher education is to shorten the numbers you need to get a college degree,” he said, adding that the Philippines’ K-12 curriculum should cover the general education courses students normally take in college.
The current K-12 curriculum in the Philippines was implemented in 2012 and introduced a comprehensive reforms including an extension of kindergarten and 10 years of basic education with an additional two years of senior high school to prepare graduates for employment opportunities pre-university.
While the secretary cited countries such as Singapore for their successful implementation of the K-12 curriculum, he acknowledged that the original intent of the country’s K-12 system, to produce technologically and technically competent graduates, has not happened for several reasons, one being a lack of capable teachers. “It will take a long time for this to be solved. The shortcut is for companies themselves to do the training,” he argued.
This is not the first time the secretary has advocated for the cutback of curriculum courses — Pascual was also the former president of the University of the Philippines in 2017 when his administration pushed for a revised general education (GE) curriculum that proposed the reduction of units in GE courses such as history and literature for a more “interdisciplinary” curriculum that “responded to the 21st century.”
Yet critics of the framework said the reduced units would come at the expense of compromising the university’s liberal education, which produces critical thinkers.
In yesterday’s conference, Pascual argued that students should focus on their major subjects in college and these courses should be job-oriented. “Now we are in a world where resources are getting depleted, there are so many problems. We need to have oriented, specific skills required by jobs,” he said.
