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Bella Cariaso - The Philippine Star
February 18, 2026 | 12:00am
MANILA, Philippines — The Commission on Higher Education (CHED) is severely incapacitated in monitoring the quality of higher education institutions (HEIs) due to its outdated charter and critical staffing shortages, the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2) revealed.
Citing extreme deficiencies in CHED’s regional monitoring capacity, EDCOM 2 noted that in some cases, a single personnel member is tasked to oversee hundreds of academic programs – making effective quality assurance mathematically impossible.
Each CHED regional office is staffed by only 20 to 28 personnel, or an average of 25, based on 398 total plantilla positions nationwide, despite being responsible for monitoring, evaluating and ensuring HEIs’ compliance with minimum standards.
Based on CHED data, EDCOM 2 said the number of colleges, universities and undergraduate programs varies significantly across regions.
There are only 398 plantilla positions in CHED regional offices supervising 37,443 programs, forcing the agency to rely heavily on contract-of-service personnel who lack the security of tenure and authority of permanent staff.
Data analyzed by the commission revealed the depth of the crisis in the country’s most densely populated regions.
In the National Capital Region (NCR), the CHED regional office has only 31 plantilla personnel overseeing 6,899 undergraduate and graduate programs – a ratio of one staff member to 223 programs.
In Region IV-A (Calabarzon), EDCOM 2 said the situation is just as alarming, with 27 personnel tasked to supervise 5,155 programs, or roughly one staff member for every 191 programs.
Meanwhile, in Region III (Central Luzon), only 25 personnel monitor 3,479 program offerings, resulting in a ratio of one staff member to 139 programs.
When CHED was established in 1994, the country had 1,755 HEIs and 1.58 million enrolled students. By academic year 2022-2023, this had grown to 1,980 HEIs serving 3.8 million students.
EDCOM 2 executive director Karol Mark Yee warned that without sufficient boots on the ground, the government cannot effectively crack down on substandard programs or “diploma mills” that continue to operate despite poor performance in licensure examinations.
Sluggish
Apart from staffing gaps, EDCOM 2 also flagged CHED’s sluggish pace in updating higher education curricula, revealing that the agency takes an average of 11 years to review and revise bachelor’s degree programs.
EDCOM 2 explained that CHED’s policies, standards and guidelines serve as the official rules defining how each degree program offered by colleges and universities nationwide must be designed, delivered and assessed.
These guidelines cover curriculum structure, faculty qualifications, required facilities and resources and internship requirements.
Citing an analysis by RTI International, EDCOM 2 noted that the decade-long interval between updates leaves curricula unresponsive to rapidly evolving workforce demands.
“Higher education curricula must not only be reactive to changes in the basic education curriculum, but must also be responsive to the evolving needs of learners and the workforce,” the EDCOM 2 said.
The commission added that the analysis exposed a “reactive” cycle compounded by a curriculum structure that remains rigidly “GE (general education)-heavy, internship light,” partly due to subjects mandated by law.
EDCOM 2 found that even after the K-12 reforms reduced general education units from 63 to 36, this did not translate into shorter or more streamlined degree programs.
Instead, the freed-up units were often filled with additional professional courses, reinforcing a long-standing pattern in which Philippine degrees carry heavier coursework than global norms.
According to EDCOM 2, this structural rigidity is worsened by fixed, legislated subjects such as the Life and Works of Rizal, Physical Education and the National Service Training Program, which consume significant unit allocations and limit the flexibility needed to swiftly update programs, making the Philippine curriculum stand out as an outlier globally for its excessive academic load coupled with insufficient practical application.
