2 student groups slam CHED for failure to close down 177 poor quality nursing schools

MANILA, Philippines - The National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP) and the College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP) slammed the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) for its seeming protection of the 177 erring nursing schools it is set to close down for poor performance in nursing licensure exams for the past five years.

Alvin Peters, NUSP president, said that CHED’s failure to identify these erring nursing schools has allowed these schools to accept students for this semester and pay for poor quality education.

Peters said that CHED, headed by Emmanuel Angeles, should have immediately come out with the names of the 177 nursing schools so that students would have been warned about their dubious quality of education.

“CHED should explain why they seem to be hesitant in identifying these schools to the detriment of the thousands of students who have enrolled in these schools not knowing of the sub-standard education given in these schools,” Peters said.

It will be recalled that Angeles had earlier announced that CHED was set to close down some 177 nursing schools for the failure of even one of their graduates to pass the nursing board exams for five years.

Angeles, when asked to identify the schools, declined to do so, saying they were still “verifying” the information they were given by the Professional Regulation Commission.

The two national student groups also asked the CHED to name 38 maritime schools that were also found to have zero passing rate in maritime profession licensure exams of the PRC for the past five years.

Vijae Alquisola, national president of CEGP, pushed for a study as to why CHED failed to stop the mushrooming of these nursing schools with sub-standard education.

“We must also make a few steps back and re-assess why these supposedly incompetent schools which offer marketable courses have mushroomed in the first place. We don’t want the students to suffer due to the backlash caused by the shortcomings of CHED in regulating the establishment and operation of these schools early on,” Alquisola said.