Removal of licensure exams must be supported by data, CHED chief says

The head of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) on Thursday said empirical data, like supply and demand, should be looked into if the government would consider removing licensure exams for professionals.

"There must be empirical basis on supply and demand," CHED chairman Prospero De Vera III said in a briefing, a day after Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III floated the idea of scrapping the licensure exams.

"An equivalent issue every time you study a particular program, is why are we doing it? Is it because of the lack of teachers? Is it because of the lack of lawyers? Is it because there is a lack of nurses so we should not give them licensures for all of them to graduate?" De Vera in a mix of Filipino and English.

De Vera said removing licensure exams could be considered if the country is in need of more professionals to meet an increasing demand.

"As far as I know, there is no deficit of lawyers in this country. In fact you can argue that there is an oversupply of lawyers. So why are you lifting it?" he asked.

Benchmarks

De Vera said degree programs that students take in the Philippines are "benchmarks" against how the degree programs are also offered in the rest of the world.

"They take tests also when they go to other countries. So there are standards that are required... and one of the standards is the licensure test. So every standard that you take out, you have to study the implication of how that affects the value of the degree, both here and abroad," he said.

The CHED chairman expressed concerns that if licensure exams are removed, other countries might not recognize the educational degrees of Filipino professionals.

Further, specific laws in professions should be looked into regarding a proposal to remove the licensure exams, he said.

"But that I will leave to legislators," De Vera said.

De Vera made the comment after Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III raised the possibility of doing away with licensure exams, particularly for law and nursing professions.

Bello, meanwhile, clarified on Thursday that he was merely proposing for the relevant regulators to study the possibility of abolishing licensure exams before a person can enter a particular profession.

“I'm not proposing to scrap, I'm proposing especially to the Philippine Nurses Association and Board of Nursing to study and that applies to others, [such as] Board of Engineering na pag-aralan nilang mabuti (study it carefully),” he said in a television interview. —KBK, GMA News