Emigration, Employability and Higher Education in the Philippines

Yasmin Ortiga

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351968744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

This book investigates the dilemma of educating students for future work in the context of the Philippines, one of the top sources of migrant labor in the world. Here, colleges and universities are expected to not only educate students for jobs within the country, but for potential employers beyond national borders. It demonstrates how human capital ideology reinforces such export-oriented education, creating an assumed relationship among academic credentials, overseas opportunity, and future migrant remittances. Findings indicate that attempts to produce migrant workers undermine the job security of college instructors, skew local curriculum towards foreign requirements, and challenge efforts to develop academic programs in line with local needs. As more developing nations turn to migration as a development strategy, colleges and universities face increasing pressures to produce future migrant workers who will have an advantage over other nationalities. This book emphasises the importance of understanding how this global phenomenon affects colleges and universities, as well as the teachers and students within these institutions. This book raises important questions on the role of universities in today's global economy and the effects of contemporary migration flows on developing countries.

1 Schooling in the migrant-sending country

In May 2013, my husband Marvin and I moved out of our Syracuse apartment, packing all our belongings into four balikbayan¹ boxes for transport from the US to the Philippines. I was to begin a year of official fieldwork. Mang Ador (short for “Salvador”), a first-generation Filipino immigrant who ran a shipping service as a side business, came to pick up our boxes with his large truck. While almost 60 years old, Mang Ador maintained a day job as a medical technologist at St. Joseph’s Hospital in downtown Syracuse. He liked to boast that he had shipped boxes for Filipino graduate students since the late 1990s, and many of his former customers were now established businessmen and state officials in the Philippines. As he and Marvin pushed our boxes from the porch to the sidewalk to his mechanised trolley, I joked that perhaps his lucrative shipping business will allow him to finally retire soon. “I want to retire!” Mang Ador puffed as he loaded the last box onto his truck. “But they have a shortage of med techs here. So many openings, no qualified applicants. Nagpapahanap na nga ako sa atin eh [I even started asking around if there’s anyone interested in applying from back home].”

I did not think much of Mang Ador’s statement until three weeks later, when I found myself sitting at the office of Albert Trinidad, the president and owner of a large, for-profit university in Manila. Albert was one of my first interviewees and we had kept in touch through the years. An accountant by training, he always began the conversation by talking about enrolment statistics. This time, he had a big prediction for the coming years. “There’s a jump in people taking medical technology… I heard there’s a big gap abroad,” he confided. “We’re going to expand the programme, my problem is that I will have a hard time finding faculty.” Thinking back to my brief conversation with Mang Ador, I asked Albert whether this increase in medical technology majors signalled a long-term demand for the degree. “Mukha! [It looks like it!]” Albert replied confidently. He claimed that friends from government agencies and private school associations have noticed the same trend. In fact, other universities were already marketing the programme to senior high school students.

One might find it ludicrous to think that the lack of specific professionals in a place like the US could lead to the subsequent expansion of university programmes in a small nation thousands of miles away. Yet, in my home country, the Philippines, such a phenomenon is hardly surprising. Already one of the world’s top sources of migrant labour, the Philippines has become widely known for training its citizens for overseas jobs in the hope of maximising the monetary remittances they will eventually send back home (De Haas 2005; Rodriguez 2010). I myself graduated at the height of the nursing boom of 2003, when news of the American embassy “giving away green cards” to healthcare workers sparked a proliferation of nursing schools and a massive number of aspiring migrants seeking nursing degrees. This book delves deeper into this process, investigating how Philippine colleges and universities actually educate graduates to become productive workers for other countries. I study these schools as institutions embedded within a commodity chain of migrant labour, where developing nations fill the human capital needs of wealthier nations higher up the chain. How do Philippine higher education institutions attempt to produce migrant labour and adjust to changing demands overseas? How do global discourses on human capital and education reinforce this production process? More importantly, how does this process affect educators and aspiring migrants?

As is the case in many other countries, Filipino families perceive college education as a means towards gainful employment. Yet, in the Philippine context, such expectations intersect with state labour export policies and a pervasive culture of migration, reinforcing the belief that higher education will immediately lead to high-paying jobs overseas. As news of labour shortages in particular fields emerge, school owners and administrators rush to offer college majors in line with such ‘needs,’ instituting large-scale institutional changes in relatively short periods of time.

Albert’s sudden interest in medical technology and his quick decision to expand the programme within his university demonstrate how rapidly these supposed overseas demands can create change within local institutions. I actually began my research only focusing on nursing education, due to a large demand for nursing degrees that stemmed from international healthcare shortages in the mid-2000s. Yet, in the middle of my fieldwork, news of the growing hospitality industry in Singapore and Dubai led to an increasing number of programmes in Hotel and Restaurant Management (HRM), forcing me to expand the scope of my project. The sudden uptick in medical technology students – at a point where I could no longer include this field in my study – indicates how quickly things can change within Philippine colleges and universities, depending on labour demands beyond national borders.

At the same time, hearing Mang Ador and Albert talk about the opportunities for Filipino medical technologists in the US underlines the need to question whether higher education institutions can truly create a supply of employable graduates that matches foreign employers’ demand. In seeking to understand how schools produce future migrant workers, it is easy to espouse the image of a school as a factory, manufacturing labour to be exported to employers overseas. Yet, unlike factories that simply work to fill specific job orders, ideas of what professions will be in demand originate from multiple sources and in a wide variety of forms. News of open positions within particular fields can come from state officials, recruitment agencies, school owners with overseas contacts, and even individual immigrants like Mang Ador, who transmit news of job opportunities to family and friends in their home communities. In the Philippines’ largely private higher education system, school owners like Albert often make big decisions based on just one of these sources. Filipino economist Edita Tan (2009) criticises such decisions as often misinformed, given that some “labour gaps” in particular nations are not as massive as anticipated or simply do not require a four-year university degree. Tan’s work has since focused on providing more comprehensive sources of information to guide both students and higher education institutions.

In contrast, this book does not aim to suggest a more efficient way of matching available overseas jobs with the types of degree programmes within Philippine colleges and universities. Rather, my research investigates how well these institutions actually fulfil their role as producers in the global exchange of migrant labour and what problematic outcomes result from their attempts to do so. What does it mean to make Filipino graduates employable to foreign employers and what are the costs of translating global needs into local curricula? In the following chapters, I show how Philippine higher education institutions do not merely react to student demands for particular majors, but also encourage the pursuit of these degrees by expanding school programmes and marketing them to students. This book describes what happens when colleges and universities seek to produce human capital for export, and global labour demands shape academic priorities in local classrooms.

Education and emigration

Researchers have generally portrayed migrant-sending nations as passive observers to emigration, where state leaders and agencies remain helpless in stemming the departure of its citizens to other nations. Only in the last decade have scholars recognised how institutions within migrant-sending countries actually facilitate migration outflows, and in fact, channel people towards particular jobs and destinations (Acacio 2008; Rodriguez 2010). For many of these countries, encouraging emigration has come to serve as an effective development strategy, where overseas remittances play an integral role in augmenting local economies (Levitt and de la Dehesa 2003). Such strategies include the explicit education of students for overseas markets to maximise their likelihood of obtaining well- paid jobs overseas (Phillips 2009). As noted by De Haas (2005, p. 1272), many of these governments intentionally create “surpluses of certain categories of the highly skilled,” with the assumption that these individuals will send money back to their families after they leave the country. To understand the issues and challenges that might result from this process, it is important to situate export-oriented education in between two areas of study: a growing literature on the changing role of higher education in a global economy, and the interdisciplinary study of the brokering of migrant workers.

The employability agenda

While schooling has always been regarded as preparation for work, the last few decades have seen the emergence of a global discourse where human skill and ability are treated as forms of physical capital much like monetary or natural resources (Becker 1964, 2002). To become employable, one must accumulate “human capital” through higher education, with the assumption that more education represents a higher level of skill. These academic credentials supposedly determine one’s position in the labour market and subsequent economic returns (Brown, Green, and Lauder 2001; Carney 2003). Numerous scholars have shown how this discourse permeates state policy and practice, promoting the belief that a nation’s social and economic progress relies on a well-educated and highly skilled citizenry (Apple 2000; Guile 2006; Powell and Snellman 2004). These studies describe how human capital discourse fuels a global “war for talent” (Brown and Hesketh 2004, p. 84), where governments must accumulate human capital, either by enhancing the skills of its local labour force or by attracting the “best and the brightest” across the world (Baker and LeTendre 2005; Kapur 2005; Lloyd and Payne 2002). The demand for more highly skilled professionals reignited questions of brain drain or how the movement of skilled workers disadvantages poor countries (see Bhagwati and Hanson 2009; Robertson 2006; Vinokur 2006). In such cases, policymakers defined “high skills” as knowledge embodied by international students, and elite professionals in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) (Cerna 2016; Guruz 2008).

Human capital ideology also prompted massive state investments in higher education and the growth of research universities in places like Asia and the Middle East (Collins and Ho 2014; Knight 2011). In particular, human capital ideals heightened pressures on universities to produce graduates who had the skills to fill the needs of a competitive market (Labaree 1997, 2012). Grubb and Lazerson (2006, p. 295) describe these ideas as part of an “education gospel,” or the belief that education is the best means to national development and that schools must be reformed according to economically driven goals. The use of the term “gospel” indicates that these ideas have been widely accepted as truth, despite the fact that few studies have empirically validated such claims. Critics have argued that this “employability agenda” forces colleges and universities to cater more to industry demands, often at the cost of knowledge production and learning (Harvey 2000, p. 9). Given such utilitarian goals, they believe that universities will come to act more like commercial businesses, treating students like commodities to be produced for the market (Apple 2000; Currie 2004; Olssen and Peters 2005). In places like the US, such beliefs have manifested in university curricula driven towards occupational preparation and diminishing support for programmes like the arts and humanities.

Despite such pressures on universities, researchers find that only a small proportion of jobs in the market require high skills. Income inequalities remain despite the growing number of college graduates (Collins 2002; Kauppinen 2012), and graduates of elite universities continue to have an advantage over those from lower-ranked institutions, creating horizontal stratification among college-educated workers (Brown, Green, and Lauder 2001). In this sense, the accumulation of education credentials is not a solution to poverty but a means of sorting people into different segments of the labour market. Yet, as college degrees become a necessary requirement for work, young people invest more and more resources on education, often with few guarantees that they will obtain their desired jobs in the future (Brown 2003; Brown and Hesketh 2004; Tomlinson 2008).

In this book, I hope to reveal how human capital ideology is manifested in the context of the Philippines, where Filipino parents and relatives often encourage children to pursue overseas work in order to “take on the ‘mission’ to be economically helpful to their families” (Barber 2008, p. 1272). In line with the human capital discourse, Filipino parents and relatives encourage children to pursue college majors associated with overseas labour demands, with the assumption that education will provide them a better chance of success in their host countries (Barber 2008; Asis and Battistella 2013). I investigate how Philippine higher education institutions take advantage of such aspirations by offering majors that purportedly enhance students’ overseas employability. I do so by linking human capital ideology to our understanding of how migrant. labour is valued and exchanged in the global market, and how schools now play a role in its production.

The ideal migrant worker

Numerous scholars have investigated how employers within receiving nations produce images of ideal migrant labour, often based on gendered and racialised assumptions about different groups. These studies reveal how employers seek migrants for their assumed docility and submissiveness, imposing work policies that force migrants to embody these stereotypes (Donato and Bankston 2008; George 2005; Liang 2011). In particular, scholars find that employers use racialised discourses to rank different ethnic groups according to their perceived fit with a particular type of work. This process creates what Waldinger and Lichter (2003, p. 8) call a “hiring queue,” where certain jobs are linked with a group of people who supposedly possess the right character traits to do the work well. Such ideals have become so pervasive that few employers question whether these workers see themselves in the same way (Elson and Pearson 1981; Salzinger 2003). Feminist scholars argue that this discourse disadvantages migrant women from Third World countries the most, given that these women are often portrayed as willing to do the most menial tasks for the lowest pay (Acker 2004; Glenn 2002).

Yet, such research locates the production process solely within receiving countries. As noted earlier, existing studies focus mainly on how migration flows are socially organised within sending communities (see Kurien 2002; Kyle 2000; Massey et al. 1990). Only recently have scholars begun to investigate how institutions within sending countries can deliberately produce workers for the global market. As Rodriguez and Schwenken (2013, p. 376) argue, “Private business actors such as recruiters, employers or money lenders, state agencies, non-governmental organisations, and last but not ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Schooling in the migrant-sending country
• 2 The making of export-oriented education
• 3 The flexible university
• 4 The burden of producing the global Filipino nurse
• 5 Learning to labour for low wage hotel work
• 6 The migration trap
• 7 Conclusion
• Index