I dropped by Region XI CHED office to grab some statistics on graduation and enrollment figures. Sad to say that they didn’t have any National Statistics available, they referred me to the CHED website. I already checked that site before going to CHED and although the CHED report said that it was last updated on September 2005, the report was for 2004.
I wanted to find out if Tech Courses were still popular with today’s youth and to see whether the demand from the first world countries to outsource IT job functions have already trickled down to our schools.
Based from the data however, I don’t find it that evident yet or maybe I’m not convinced with an 18% overall growth rate between 1999 and 2003 for Com Sci courses? So I can assume that Tech enrollees are holding constant for now. It dipped slightly at 2003 but so did the National values (a dip of 6k). Now compare that with Medical Courses which had ecstatic growth even with the drop in the National Enrollment. Medical Courses had an 112% increase between 1999-2004 levels, Eng & Tech had a -1.8% drop while Math & Com Sci had an 18% increase.
What I was able to obtain from the Region XI office was the no. of enrollees for Region XI. Comparing the Tech enrollees (Com Sci, Com Eng, Information Technology and Information Mgt) vs Nursing alone we see the popularity of tech courses over nursing in 2001-2002. By 2003-2004 we have twice the no. of nursing enrollees over the combined Tech Curriculum. Come 2005-2006 there is a decrease of 2k for both Tech and Nursing courses. I have to wonder if this is the effect of the educational plan sector imploding? Leaving a lot of students without any means to pay for their tuition.
Since Medical Courses provide the best opportunity for the youth today to go abroad and earn a lot of money, that is the reason for it’s popularity (My apologies for stating the obvious hehehe). So Med over Tech in any given day.
Added this other graph just incase you were wondering how the graduation rate was. Still shows that we’re producing more tech grads over medical grads in 2003. But I doubt if these figures still hold true in the long run.