Missing freshmen

One of the serious objections raised against the government’s plan to add two years to the basic education cycle comes from private colleges and universities or Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Put in its simplest terms, the objection runs this way: while students are in Grades 11 and 12, who will enrol in college?

In order to solve a problem, it is important to understand the problem thoroughly. Let us look at the situation that will evolve due to K-12.

The first high school students to be affected by the additional years will be those entering Grade 7 (or First Year High School) in June 2012.

It will take these students four years to get to Grade 10 (or Fourth Year High School). That will then be March or April 2016.

In School Year (SY) 2016-17, therefore, students will be going to Grade 11 (or Fifth Year High School) and not enrolling in college, which they would have done had there been no K-12.

For SY 2016-17, therefore, the argument goes, there will be no entering freshmen in HEIs.

The next year, SY 2017-18, the same students will be going to Grade 12 (or Sixth Year High School.) Following the same logic, there will still not be any entering freshmen in HEIs.

In short, for two years, HEIs will find themselves without new students.

That, however, is not the end of it.

In SY 2018-19, the students that have finished Grade 12 will enter college. That does not solve the problem, because there will be no sophomores (since there were no freshmen in the earlier year) and no juniors (since there were no sophomores). There will still be two years of missing students.

In SY 2019-20, the freshmen will be sophomores, and the Grade 12 graduates will be freshmen. But there will be no juniors and no seniors. There will still be two missing batches.

In SY 2020-21, there will be no seniors.

Everything will normalize only in School Year 2021-22, or a full five years after June 2016.

Of course, if college were reduced to three years for most courses (which is the current plan of CHED), the missing senior batch would be irrelevant, except for courses like nursing, engineering, and other specializations that require at least three years of major subjects.

Can HEIs afford five years of drastically reduced enrolment?

We have to distinguish between government-run schools — State Universities and Colleges (SUCs) and Local Universities and Colleges (LUCs) — and private HEIs.

SUCs and LUCs do not have a real problem. Their teachers will get paid whether there are enough students or not. In fact, this threat should be considered a great opportunity for SUCs and LUCs. Teachers of the missing batches can use the time to go for further studies or to do research.

Private HEIs have a real problem. Their teachers are dependent on the income of the school, which more often than not comes only from tuition and miscellaneous fees. If a school loses income, then it has to let go of teachers. That is easier said than done, since most schools do not want to lose good teachers and many schools have strong faculty unions that will make life hell for administrators.

Now that we have defined the problem, let us look at the proposed solutions, of which there are several.

The first proposal is to exempt private schools from the K-12 plan for two years. This does not affect private basic education schools (which usually have more than one preschool level and even an extra Grade 7 anyway, already equivalent to 12 years). It makes life much easier, however, for private HEIs. These private HEIs can just accept graduates of Grade 10 in SY 2016-17 and SY 2017-18. There will then be students every year for every batch.

The advantage of this proposal is that there will be no disruption in the faculty loading of HEIs for two years. The disadvantage of this proposal is that it merely postpones the decision on what to do with teachers teaching subjects in the General Education Curriculum (GEC). In SY 2018-19, Grade 12 graduates would have already taken the English, Filipino, Math, and Science subjects now included in the GEC.

The second proposal is to have private HEIs host Grades 11 and 12 on their campuses, with their teachers teaching the Senior High School subjects.

The advantage of this proposal is that it does not displace the GEC teachers. The disadvantage is that, even if the enormous coordination problems were solved, it assumes that the GEC subjects will be incorporated into high school exactly as they are today. That, however, would not be theoretically correct. One of the major reasons K-12 was undertaken is the realization that we are trying to teach in 10 years what other countries teach in 12.

In other words, we should not add new subjects to the current curriculum, but merely enhance it by giving students more time to absorb the learning. (An obvious exception, however, is Calculus, which is a high school subject everywhere else in the world.) College teachers will not be necessarily qualified to teach the SHS subjects. There is also the requirement for all high school teachers to have passed the Licensure Examination for Teachers (LET). (To be continued)