School Licensure Exam Performance and Engineer Shortage in the Philippines

This policy brief examines the licensure exam performance of HEIs in the four most popular engineering fields: civil; electrical; electronics; and mechanical engineering. Although there are observed differences across programs (e.g., much higher passing rate in mechanical compared to electronics engineering), two consistent findings from the analyses are that small schools tend to perform much worse than larger schools, and the student-to-faculty ratio is inversely related to performance. These results suggest that the school’s financial capacity and, therefore, their ability to invest in well-equipped laboratories and to hire an adequate number of well-trained faculty may be especially crucial in engineering. Policy responses are necessary to improve the availability of quality engineering programs. Interventions will be necessary to increase the number of future engineers to support the government’s planned heavy investment in infrastructure and development outside Metro Manila.
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