Playing cat-and-mouse with higher education

By Jam Magdaleno and Cesar Ilao III

(Part 2)

IN PART ONE of this column, we examined the Commission on Higher Education’s (CHED) reframed General Education (GE) curriculum and argued that, like many statist interventions, it suffers from both the knowledge problem and the political economy of reform. Together, these generate a cumulative effect: an interventionist approach to education creates the conditions for further interventions ad infinitum.

If CHED cannot accurately anticipate the evolving realities of the labor market, then who can? The answer is not a more sophisticated governing body, but the universities and colleges themselves. Let the schools design their GE curriculum. Rather than mandating a uniform number of GE units across all universities, decentralizing the tertiary education system could free higher education from the interventionist trap in which CHED increasingly finds itself.

What makes decentralization a better alternative? Its greatest strength lies in its capacity to function as its own discovery procedure. No single regulator, however well-intentioned, can possess all the dispersed and constantly changing information necessary to determine the optimal curriculum for every institution, industry, and student. Universities, by contrast, operate much closer to the realities they seek to address.

First, in contrast to CHED, a decentralized system collects information more quickly. The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) The Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that 22% of jobs will be structurally disrupted by 2030, with 170 million new roles created and 92 million displaced. It also estimates that nearly 40% of workers’ core skills will change within the same period, while 63% of employers already cite skills gaps as the main barrier to business transformation. LinkedIn’s Work Change Report cites that by 2030, 70% of the skills used in most jobs are expected to change, with professionals entering the workforce today on pace to hold twice as many jobs over their careers as workers did 15 years ago. Given that CHED takes 11 years on average to revise its policies for college programs and curricula to address these changes, can we afford to wait another decade?

Knowledge of what communities and businesses need is always localized and fleeting. A university in a tech hub like Taguig will notice and innovate around a growing demand for specific AI competencies years before it registers on a bureaucrat’s radar. Meanwhile, a university in an agricultural province may place greater emphasis on agribusiness, rural entrepreneurship, rural sociology, community governance, and the application of AI towards climate-resilient farming.

Contrary to fears that artificial intelligence will render the humanities obsolete, decentralization would make it easier for universities to integrate the humanities into their curricula. Doesn’t this hit two birds with one stone? Universities both retain — even bolster — a humanistic education while remaining responsive to industry demands. Indeed, some institutions may view the cultivation of technologically proficient yet socially aware graduates as a competitive advantage and adjust their curricula accordingly. Rather than forcing all universities into a uniform mold, a decentralized system would allow different educational models to emerge, compete, and evolve in response to changing student preferences and labor-market realities. The WEF itself notes that the fastest- growing skills will not be purely technical, but human ones, such as analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility, leadership, and the capacity for collaboration.

Second, labor markets already respond continuously to price signals. A growing body of evidence from job-posting data shows that skill requirements are strongly associated with wages, and that more skill-intensive positions remain unfilled for longer periods. These adjustments occur not at the national aggregate level but within specific occupations and regions, where wage and hiring dynamics are far more sensitive to local conditions. Schools and students on the ground know better than CHED, don’t they?

Third, decentralization enables experimentation under uncertainty. Even within the same occupational category, organizations and businesses demand substantially different bundles of skills, with variation driven by technology, organizational strategy, and local context of production and operation. This heterogeneity implies that there is no single stable mapping between “job titles” and “required competencies.” In effect, each organization is already conducting its own curricular experiment through their own hiring decisions. CHED’s centralized system, by contrast, forces a single curricular forecast onto a highly heterogeneous and rapidly evolving system, concentrating the risk of error rather than diversifying it. Meaning, when CHED’s prescribed curriculum fails, all universities are collectively forced to absorb the costs of that policy failure.

Finally, decentralization corrects the misallocation caused by poor decisions more quickly because universities can self-correct without having to undergo lengthy bureaucratic processes. If a university continues teaching obsolete skills and subjects, it faces a swift reality check in the form of declining enrollment, rising graduate underemployment, or, ultimately, closure. As discussed in Part One, CHED’s curriculum-setting framework lacks this capacity for rapid course correction, making it far less responsive to shifts in labor-market realities.

Now, let us grant CHED the benefit of the doubt. Suppose they aren’t trying to act as prophets predicting the future. Suppose they’re merely trying to align college courses with the current, undeniable realities of the market today. It still falls short of the same problem identified. The moment CHED identifies a “current reality” (e.g., a need for data ethics or professional communication), drafts a policy, subjects it to public hearings (which inevitably attract fierce opposition), delays it for two or more years, and rolls it out, years have passed. By the time a freshman enters that program and graduates four years later, that “current reality” is ancient history.

A cross-country 2019 OECD study by Carlos Xabel-Lastra-Anadón and Sonia Mukherjee finds a strong causal link between administrative decentralization — especially when combined with school autonomy — and better student performance. Structural transformation models done by a 2018 IMF cross-country analysis also show that when labor markets are more flexible, workers move from low- to high-productivity sectors, helping close about 13.7% of productivity gaps each year. However, this reallocation is much slower in developing countries where rigid, state-imposed rules limit movement and adjustment. Similarly, an OECD (2024) report on curriculum flexibility titled “Curriculum Flexibility and Autonomy: Promoting a Thriving Learning Environment” finds that schools with more local autonomy are better able to innovate and adapt during technological shocks. Again, decentralization enables experimentation under uncertainty.

This does not mean that CHED is a defunct institution. With the right reform, it can help address the gaps that may emerge in a decentralized tertiary education system. Some economists have proposed repurposing CHED into an independent rating agency — think Moody’s, but for universities. Under this model, CHED would focus less on centrally designing curricula and more on auditing outcomes by publishing institutional scorecards that track actual graduate results, such as employment outcomes, long-term wage trajectories, and career alignment. Economists Michael Hurwitz and Jonathan Smith evaluated the causal impact of the US Department of Education’s “College Scorecard,” which published the median earnings of graduates. They found a direct substitution effect: a 10% increase in a college’s reported median earnings increased applications to that school by 2.4%. This suggests that the state can help close the information asymmetry gap in higher education.

By generating and disseminating reliable information on educational outcomes, CHED could empower students to make better choices while allowing universities greater freedom to innovate and differentiate themselves.

This is only one of many proposals currently being advanced. But arriving at these alternatives will remain a fantasy, until we reckon with the fundamental flaw in the mode of thinking underlying CHED’s curriculum revisions. Just look at the episodic history of GE reform, where exactly has this led us? If the current logic persists, the Philippines risks remaining trapped in a perpetual cat-and-mouse chase with higher education.

(Read Part 1 here: Playing cat-and-mouse with higher education — https://tinyurl.com/2bsw7ha2)

Jam Magdaleno is the head of Information and Communications at the Foundation for Economic Freedom (FEF) and is an Asia Freedom fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and King’s College London. Cesar Ilao III is a researcher and communications specialist for the FEF. He is a lecturer at the University of the Philippines and was formerly a researcher at Monash University, Australia.