Project Dunong Alay

Around 12,000 professors would be without jobs come 2016 and 2017. That's because the first batches of grade 11 and grade 12 students will have an extended stay in high school. This will result to near-zero enrollment for college freshmen and sophomores during those years.  

These professors have families to feed. Thus, they may be forced to go abroad for employment during those two years. They may never to return to teaching in 2018 after feeling abandoned by the government and after getting higher salaries as overseas Filipino workers (OFWs).

DepEd proposes to aid the 12,000 upgrade their teaching skills through post-graduate scholarships for doctoral and masters’ degrees. Sure, why not? State colleges and universities (SUCs) have hundreds of thousands of undergraduate scholars,  so adding 12,000 more is really not a big deal.

However, DepEd’s proposal is not a complete solution. Why? Because the professors who would lose their jobs, as well as their families, have to eat  and will have bills to pay during those two years in limbo.

Here’s what we propose.   

Simultaneous to the professors taking PhDs or MAs,  enjoin the country’s top 2,000 corporations to consider employing the professors in the interim two years. This could be  part of their corporate  social responsibility (CSR) and for their mutual benefit.

For example, let the technology, pharmaceutical, engineering and other related industries employ the math and science professors. The agriculture and food manufacturing sectors would certainly have much need for agri and bio-tech professors.  

Meanwhile, the professors of liberal arts may be attached to government and private sector cultural offices like museums and libraries, among others. The sociology professors may be absorbed by the DSWD for field work. LGUs may benefit from having political science profs in their midst.

This has been done before albeit in the field of sports during the Marcos years with Project Gintong Alay. Under this project, the country’s top corporations adopted the country’s top athletes, providing them ample allowances so they could focus on training instead of eking out a living.

In the case of the professors to be employed by the private sector and government units, they would neither be just wallpapers nor charity cases. Having the brains, they could really make their employment beneficial to their employers in an undertaking we’d like to call Project Dunong Alay.   

                                        -end-