‘Even from the early grades, it seems like the focus is more on beauty pageants, dance contests, and pointless subjects than on actual studying and learning.’ This drives me crazy. Far more energy and attention go into this kind of garbage than into academics, and families waste money they can't afford.

Employer here. Unless they went to a top-10 university, colleges here are just glorified high schools. I get applications from college grads who routinely can't answer grade 9 math questions.

You don't send them to a good school for the education… you do it for the network your kids will build. It's always about who knows who.

It's a good filter when there's an abundance of labor.

I'm an American in my late 20s. Not trying to exaggerate, but back in the States I have friends with computer science degrees working at Best Buy and finance majors making sales calls at car dealerships. It's been getting worse for years in a lot of countries, and the value of a degree has dropped. In the Philippines, outside of certain schools and majors, the quality is pretty bad, and there's an oversupply of workers in a country where time and labor are worth next to nothing, so you get this result. I once met a woman with a master's in IT who was adding up numbers from an Excel spreadsheet by hand or with a regular calculator. When I told her she could just use the SUM function, she didn't know what I meant, and when I showed her, you'd have thought she'd just met Oppenheimer. It's pretty bad.

Philippine education has been poor since the 1920s, according to the Monroe Report published back then. It's stayed that way ever since, as you can see in average standardized test scores (30 to 50 percent) and in international assessments (since the 1990s). So a college degree gets demanded even for jobs that don't need one, and even degrees are questionable unless they're from a few schools. The main reason education is poor is that the national budget is too small, and it's too small because the economy barely grew and only just kept up with the population. And the economy has been weak because the country insists on copying US economic policies and its political system. Neighboring countries had better-performing education systems because their economies were stronger, and their economies got stronger because they did the opposite of the Philippines on economic policy and political systems.

You're hanging out with the wrong crowd