Unemployed

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MANILA, Philippines — Not having a job has always been a serious concern for many Filipinos. Our economy has consistently failed to create the jobs needed by a workforce that grows by a million to a million and a half annually, adding to a backlog of the unemployed from past years.

Recent 2025 and 2026 surveys from major polling firms like Pulse Asia and Social Weather Stations consistently show that employment-related issues are a top concern for Filipinos, though they currently rank behind high prices and corruption.

In the most recent Pulse Asia survey released in early January 2026, creating more jobs and livelihood opportunities ranked among the top three immediate priorities Filipinos want the government to address.

But our economy had struggled to produce the domestic jobs required by a growing population. So, people were exported instead.

From January to November 2025, the Department of Migrant Workers recorded the deployment of 2.57 million overseas Filipino workers. This represents a substantial increase from the 1.2 million deployed in 2022 and 1.8 million in 2023.

There is also another troubling trend with our employment statistics. Official data from 2025 and early 2026 indicate that college graduates are accounting for an increasingly larger portion of the unemployed population.

As of February 2025, college graduates and those with some college education accounted for 44.1 percent of all unemployed Filipinos. And those who actually completed a degree made up 35.6 percent of the total jobless, a significant increase from 26.9 percent in 2020.

A December 2023 SWS survey found that adult joblessness was highest among college graduates at 22.1 percent, surpassing rates for junior high school and elementary graduates. By November 2025, the number of unemployed college graduates was estimated at about 922,000 individuals.

Nearly 80 percent of all unemployed Filipinos have at least a high school degree. All these show a worrying failure of our educational system. Getting a diploma no longer guarantees a way of breaking out of poverty.

Why is this happening? One, our colleges and universities are not providing the right education that will make students employable after graduation. Indeed, local companies complain that they are unable to fill their vacancies because there is a lack of suitable applicants to hire.

Beyond a gap in education and skills needed, there seems to be a serious failure of the Commission on Higher Education in assuring quality education. It seems CHED had been too politicized to go after diploma mills connected with powerful politicians.

Because getting into politics and government is considered a sure-fire way of getting employment and getting rich, parents want their children to go into law and criminology. What our country needs more are engineers, doctors and teachers qualified to teach math and science.

And with the current state of our economy, most new jobs are in low-wage sectors like retail and construction, which do not require a college education.

Our employment and employability problems go deeper than mere policy tweaks. The quality of public education has deteriorated to the point that taxpayers are now paying for almost nothing.

Filipino students’ proficiency drops sharply from early grades to Senior High School, falling from 30.52 percent in Grade 3 to just 0.47 percent by Grade 12.

EDCOM 2 found only about four out of every 1,000 senior high school students meet expected learning standards. So, how can these students expect to be hired after graduation?

EDCOM 2 said data from DepEd from 2023 to 2025 show that 70 percent of learners “continue to struggle with foundational skills” at the third grade.

“This includes recognizing letters and sounds, reading common words, understanding short passages, counting on their own or doing simple numerical problem-solving,” the commission said.

Citing the 2024 National Achievement Test, EDCOM found that by the time students reach Grade 6, proficiency drops by 11 percentage points to just 19.56 percent, meaning that only one in five students were considered “proficient.”

The rates decline dramatically in high school, with only 14 in every 1,000 students at Grade 10 and four in every 1,000 at Grade 12 “can demonstrate skills such as problem solving, managing and communicating information and analyzing and evaluating data to create or formulate ideas.”

“Because literacy is the essential gateway to numeracy and all other subjects, students who fall behind early find it increasingly impossible to comprehend more complex curricula in higher grades,” EDCOM observed.

The commission described this steep trajectory of underperformance as a “disadvantage that hardens into a learning gap” of 5.5 years by the time a student reaches age 15. This learning gap, as defined by the World Bank, represents a “structural failure” in the education-to-employment pipeline.

This learning gap means that even though Filipino students spend an average of 12 years in school, they effectively gain only about six years of productive learning.

This “learning poverty” limits workers to low-paid, informal or unskilled labor because they cannot master the advanced skills required for high-value services.

While some programs were launched to address this learning gap including targeting the “earliest years” to address early learning deficits from hardening into long-term employment disadvantages, DepEd as it is with almost all government agencies, has a chronic inability to execute policies to produce desired results.

We must worry about our increasingly limited ability to provide BPO workers specially up the value chain as AI becomes more prevalent. Then, there are Trump’s efforts to onshore most of these offshored services. This means the ability of the BPO industry to be an employment growth driver may be nearing its end.

All these because we chose lousy leaders over the last 50 years. We now have a hot political power keg situation. Having a lot of unemployed college educated people discontented enough to create political trouble is a risk we now face. It blew up in Indonesia last year. We could be next.

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on X @boochanco