Employment of K-12 graduates

Hire K-12 graduates.

That was the appeal Education Secretary and Vice President Sara Duterte made to business executives in her keynote address at the recent Philippine Business Conference.

She said the business sector has a “diploma mentality” in the hiring of employees, i.e., employers prefer to hire holders of college degrees rather than K-12 graduates.

To address this issue, she stated that “the Department of Education is already working on how to make our grades 11 to 12 ready for work and are skill-ready when they graduate from the K-12 program.”

When the program was launched in 2013, one of its objectives was to enable high school graduates who do not want to pursue college studies or cannot do so for financial or other reasons to quickly find employment.

The program assumed that the expanded curriculum for secondary education would provide its graduates with skills that would qualify them for employment in businesses that do not require higher education.

The K-12 program has been successful in developed countries that adopted it. Its graduates are employed in businesses that require, at the minimum, the willingness to learn and follow instructions, particularly in, among others, sales, merchandising and mechanical works.

The business sector’s preference for college graduates is understandable. In the first place, there is a huge pool of such graduates to choose from with varying degrees of academic proficiency.

Every year, over a million Filipinos graduate from the country’s 2,300 colleges and universities, 112 of which are funded by the national government or financially capable local government units.

Between a job applicant with four years of tertiary education and a high school graduate, an employer cannot be faulted for assuming that the former is a better choice for employment.

Note that unless the applicant had been earlier endorsed or recommended by somebody known to the employer, the latter has only the applicant’s application letter or curriculum vitae as starting point in deciding who to consider for employment.

The inconvenient truth is, the “diploma mentality” is a product of decades of cultural and social perception that a college degree is proof of a Filipino’s intelligence or a reliable measure of his or her potential to be a productive member of society.

The pride in college education by Filipino families is shown by the prominent display of the framed diploma in the living room for visitors to see and behold.

The less satisfactory regard for high school graduates is aggravated by the fact that, except for a few, many of the country’s high schools suffer from inadequate teaching facilities, poorly-paid teachers and overburdened supervisors.

Thus, college education is often looked at as the opportunity by which shortcomings or inadequacies in secondary education are filled up or remedied.

Given this situation, most employers are inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to college graduates as against high school graduates in passing upon their qualification for employment.

It would take a major paradigm shift in the mindset of many businesses in putting high school graduates on a par with college graduates in the employment arena. If at all, that may take years considering the present state of secondary education in the country.

Clearly, the government cannot compel the business sector to give preferential treatment to high school graduates in its employment process. That would be unconstitutional.

To encourage businesses to go out on a limb in employing high school graduates, the government should incentivize it or give benefits that would make that action worth getting into for them.

The government can take a leaf from Republic Act No. 7277, which provides that employers “shall be entitled to an additional deduction from their gross income, equivalent to twenty-five percent (25%) of the total amount paid as salaries and wages to disabled persons.” INQ

For comments, please send your email to “[email protected].”