First of a series
THERE is something deeply troubling about the direction higher education is taking. The danger is not loud or dramatic. It does not announce itself as a crisis. It arrives quietly, wrapped in the language of innovation, competitiveness and global relevance. It presents itself as reform. But beneath the surface, it is steadily hollowing out what a university is supposed to be.
We are witnessing the quiet rise of a neoliberal education order.
At the core of this transformation is a simple but dangerous premise: that universities exist primarily to produce graduates who are immediately usable by the economy. Everything else such as critical thinking, philosophical inquiry, historical consciousness, ethical reflection becomes secondary. Education is no longer treated as a public good but as an investment, a commodity, a pipeline.
And pipelines are not designed to think. They are designed to deliver.
This logic is most visible in the growing fixation on university rankings. Institutions obsess over their position in global league tables, treating them as definitive markers of excellence. But rankings are not neutral. They privilege publication volume, citation metrics and research income, indicators aligned with the priorities of the global knowledge economy.
What happens to disciplines that do not produce outputs at the same scale? What happens to philosophy, history, literature and the social sciences, where knowledge is valued for its capacity to interrogate society?
They become liabilities.
Universities, eager to climb rankings, reallocate resources. STEM programs expand. Industry-linked research is prioritized. Humanities departments are downsized or quietly neglected. The message becomes clear: knowledge matters only if it can be measured, monetized or instrumentalized.
This is not accidental. It is the predictable outcome of a system that defines success through narrow indicators.
The same logic underpins accreditation regimes and global benchmarking systems such as AUN-QA. These frameworks claim to ensure quality through standards and continuous improvement. On the surface, they appear reasonable.
But what they produce is a culture of compliance.
Quality becomes whatever can be measured. Learning is reduced to outcomes that can be mapped. Teaching is evaluated through matrices. Programs are judged based on alignment with predefined indicators. Faculty members spend increasing time producing documentation rather than engaging in intellectual work.
The audit replaces inquiry.
Once this happens, something fundamental shifts. The university ceases to be a space of contestation. It becomes a bureaucratic machine designed to produce evidence of quality rather than quality itself.
This is not merely administrative. It is epistemic.
When knowledge is forced into measurable formats, entire ways of knowing are marginalized. Indigenous knowledge systems, community-based learning and context-specific insights do not fit neatly into standardized templates. They are relational, experiential and resistant to quantification.
In the process of making them legible, we do not simply simplify them. We transform them, stripping away context, politics and meaning.
And yet, we call this improvement.
Parallel to this is the aggressive institutionalization of outcomes-based education (OBE). At first glance, OBE appears pedagogically sound. It emphasizes clarity of learning goals, alignment between teaching and assessment, and accountability.
The problem lies in how it is implemented.
Education is reduced to a linear sequence: outcomes, activities, assessments. Learning is treated as a process that can be engineered and measured with precision.
But education is not an assembly line.
Critical thinking does not emerge from perfectly aligned rubrics. Intellectual curiosity cannot be programmed through standardized outcomes. The most transformative moments in education are often those that cannot be anticipated or measured.
They are disruptions.
OBE, in its current form, leaves little room for this. It privileges clarity over ambiguity, structure over exploration and predictability over discovery. In doing so, it risks producing graduates who are technically competent but intellectually constrained.
This brings us to the most immediate and perhaps most dangerous development: the proposed reframing of the General Education (GE) curriculum by the Commission on Higher Education.
On paper, the proposal appears progressive. It promises coherence, relevance and responsiveness to contemporary challenges. It integrates digital literacy and employability skills. It aligns with national and international frameworks.
But look closer.
The proposal mandates a minimum of 18 units of GE, with expansion to 36 units allowed only for autonomous institutions. This creates a two-tiered system. Elite universities can preserve a richer liberal education. Others, constrained by compliance and resources, will settle for the minimum.
The result is stratification.
Students in well-resourced institutions will engage philosophy, history and critical theory. They will learn to question and reflect.
Students in compliance-driven institutions will receive a streamlined, technocratic version of GE focused on communication, data and employability.
This is not reform. This is the institutionalization of inequality.
Even more telling is the composition of the proposed core GE courses: Professional Communication, Global Trends and Emerging Technologies, Data and Evidence, Rizal and Philippine Studies, and Labor Education. Each has value, but together they reveal a clear orientation.
They are designed to produce workers.
Where are the courses that cultivate philosophical reasoning? Where are the spaces for deep engagement with literature, ethics and the human condition? Where is the recognition that education is not only about preparing students for work, but also for life?
They are being quietly pushed to the margins.
This is the true danger of neoliberal education. It does not abolish critical thinking outright. It simply makes it less central, less funded and less valued. Over time, what is marginalized becomes invisible.
We end up with universities that are globally competitive but intellectually hollow.
This is not an argument against reform. Universities must evolve. But evolution should not come at the cost of erasing the essence of higher education. Because the university, at its best, is not a factory. It is not a training center. It is not a service provider. It is a space where society thinks.
And when that space is reduced to a pipeline for the economy, we lose not only the humanities and the social sciences. We lose the capacity to question the very system that demands this transformation.
That is a loss we cannot afford.
To be continued on May XX, 2026
The author is a professor at the University of the Philippines Los Baños and vice chairman of the board of the state-run PTVNI.
