Hollow Skills, Broken Ladder

We all believe in the promise of TESDA. For decades, we’ve held it up as one of the great equalizers in Philippine society—a practical, hands-on ladder for the masa. It’s the second chance for the out-of-school youth, the upskill for the contractual worker, the path to a better life.

That’s the story we tell ourselves. A new, damning report from the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) suggests the story is, at best, a fantasy.

The study, authored by Dr. Maribel Daño, reveals a devastating, two-pronged failure. Not only is TESDA failing who it is mandated to serve – the poor – but it is also failing at what it is supposed to deliver: relevant skills for real jobs.

It’s a one-two punch to the gut of social mobility. We are spending billions on a system that is both betraying its mission and wasting our money.

First, let’s talk about the betrayal.

TESDA’s legal and moral mandate is simple: prioritize the disadvantaged. Yet, the PIDS study finds a clear “decline in the share of poor and disadvantaged scholars” and, in their place, an “increasing participation among wealthier Filipinos.”

This is a clear case of systemic rot. In 2022, TESDA was allocated PHP 7.77 billion. That money is intended to be a lifeline, but it’s increasingly being thrown to those who already know how to swim.

How does this happen? The report points to a critical flaw: school-initiated screening processes that “prioritize high-potential students regardless of financial background.” This is an institutional bias, plain and simple. It’s a system designed to reward those who are already advantaged – those with better basic education, more resources, and more “potential” – instead of doing the hard work of uplifting those who need it most.

The result is a geographic and social injustice. The study confirms that the country’s poorest regions, like BARMM and Region IX, receive lower shares of the scholarship budget than wealthier regions.

The solution has been sitting right there for years: use the DSWD’s Listahanan and the Philippine Identification System (PhilSys) to verify poverty. The PIDS study repeats this obvious recommendation. We must ask: Why has this common-sense step not been mandatory all along?

But the betrayal doesn’t end there. Even for the scholars who get in, the promise is often hollow.

The second failure identified by PIDS is the great skills mismatch. TESDA is operating as a multi-billion-peso “certificate mill,” churning out graduates for jobs that don’t exist or don’t require their certification.

The study found a “significant negative association” between the certifications acquired and the graduates’ actual job roles. In plain English: the piece of paper they worked so hard for is often not useful.

Of the three major scholarship programs reviewed, only one – UAQTEA – showed a clear alignment between training and job outcomes. That is an abysmal success rate. This is what happens when an agency is disconnected from the actual, on-the-ground needs of local industry.

This is a cruel joke to play on our people. We ask them to invest their most precious resource – their time – in exchange for a credential that local employers don’t value. We must stop measuring TESDA’s success by its enrollment numbers and “graduates.” The only metric that matters is relevant employment.

These two failures are linked. It seems TESDA is chasing “productivity” over “equity.” It’s easier to hit quotas by letting schools pick “high-potential” students and run easy-to-fill courses, regardless of market demand. It’s much harder to do the real work: go into poor communities, recruit the marginalized, and build programs that align with local industries.

We need TESDA to work. But to do that, we must demand accountability. It’s time to mandate poverty-targeting using Listahanan and stop wasting billions on useless certificates. Our people deserve a real ladder, not a broken one.