CHED scored over 9 schools with ‘colorum’ courses

The Commission on Audit said in a report that the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) failed to enforce the phaseout of engineering and accounting courses in nine schools whose graduates performed poorly in licensure examinations.

The auditors said in their report of the CHED’s 2007 operations that the agency’s National Capital Region office, headed by Amelia Biglete, failed to do its job of implementing program termination orders on the nine schools, which “still accepted 1,194 enrollees for the first year level” of their engineering and accounting courses, which were supposed to be shut down by schoolyear 2005-06.

In their audit of CHED-NCR’s implementation of the closure order on at least 23 programs of 18 colleges and universities, the auditors noted that AMA Computer College-Fairview still continued to accept enrollees for its computer engineering and electronics and communications engineering courses while AMA Computer College-San Juan still accepted enrollees for its computer engineering course.

The audit also found that ABE International College of Business and Economics-Legarda, Jose Rizal University (JRU), Manuel L. Quezon University, National College of Business and the Arts-Cubao, NCBA-Fairview, Santa Isabel College and Trinity University of Asia still accepted enrollees for their accounting programs, which they were told to stop offering.

Asked for comment, Biglete told The STAR that she was unaware of the COA audit of their implementation of the closure orders on the school programs.

“I have to verify the records if that’s true,” Biglete said.

JRU president Vincent Fabella said that they were able to get CHED to “hold in abeyance” the closure order on their accountancy program.

Fabella, a former president of the Philippine Association of Colleges and Universities, said JRU had questioned CHED over the change it made on the “parameters” for closure of a certain undergraduate program of a school.

“CHED changed the parameters without public hearing,” Fabella said.

CHED, as the government agency tasked to regulate institutes of higher education, is responsible for going after “diploma mills” or dubious schools that churn out certificates to thousands of students they accept every year without regard for whether they have been adequately prepared for licensure exams and subsequent local or foreign employment.

In the same report, the COA also expressed alarm over the CHED-NCR’s failure to close 19 nursing schools that failed to have even a single graduate pass the nursing licensure exams from 2001 to 2005.