Shoddy maritime schools are a poor excuse to exact money from the parents of would-be ship officers. They’re also a disgrace to the country, as we now witness in the European Commission plan to withdraw recognition of Filipino seafarer certificates. Yet, two things need to be said before anyone applauds the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) for ordering the closure of the BS Marine Transportation and BS Marine Engineering programmes at PMI Colleges, formerly the Philippine Maritime Institute (PMI).First, substandard academies would not even exist if the authorities concerned did a proper job of supervising them and otherwise upholding the STCW standards. That the opposite is true is clear from the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) report on the Philippines after the follow-up inspection in 2010. To put it more positively, PMI Colleges would most probably have corrected the deficiencies found by the EMSA team during its first inspection in 2006 if CHED officials had performed their duty. The irony is that thousands of PMI cadets are now forced to transfer to other schools whilst not a single CHED official or employee has been reprimanded or, much less, fired.
Second, what will CHED do with the rest of the 85-plus schools offering maritime baccalaureate programmes? Last October, we got some inkling of how bad some of these institutions are when we served on the panel of judges for the selection of the country’s top maritime students. Although some of the 23 candidates answered the judges’ questions intelligently in correct English, one or two didn’t even know what the IMO was. One lad enrolled in marine engineering could not give a decent answer when we asked how rust is formed.
On the face of it, the CHED closure order on PMI Colleges, issued on 14th October 2011 after the owners’ appeal was denied, is laudable. Founded in 1948, PMI is one of the country’s oldest seafarer institutions but had the most number of outstanding deficiencies amongst the five schools inspected by EMSA in 2010. It’s too early to tell, however, if the Filipino authorities have mustered the political will to clean the stables. Failure to follow through on the clean-up will only bolster the suspicion that PMI has been made a sacrificial lamb to appease the EU gods. ~Barista Uno
NOTE: A copy of the CHED closure order on PMI Colleges can be downloaded from Marine Café Blog’s Downloads section.
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