If studying a liberal arts degree has taught me anything, it is that I may be rapidly barrelling down the path toward unemployment. For nearly three years, I have unapologetically dedicated myself to my passions—excitedly participating in stuffy lectures carried out by esteemed professors, reading pages upon pages of lush, weighty literature, and pouring nights into papers I was deliriously convinced would become research congress candidates. But as I enter my final year and see togas and caps dotting the horizon, my stomach churns with uncertainty over my post-college plans.
Being a political science student, I operate under the expectation that my undergraduate program is a stepping stone to law school. When I confided in my parents that I would much rather pursue a master’s degree, they were, at once, skeptical. Of several reservations, my mother’s most pressing question rose above them all: “Paano ka ba magkakapera n’yan?”
(How will you earn money from that?)
It is a sentiment I, and many others, have grappled with before. In a society primarily concerned with efficiency and profitability, graduates blaze the race toward practical and lucrative professions, the pursuit of knowledge often deemed an overlooked and pointless route. This, coupled with the liberal arts’ reputation as impractical and irrelevant to “real-world” knowledge, renders its devaluation in favor of the hard sciences, contributing to many graduates’ anxieties as they navigate a more limited job market and consider a postgraduate education. But there is a scarcity of resources—like grants and scholarships—in the humanities compared to those in science and technology, which heightens barriers to further education because those in need of financial aid are discouraged from entry.
Unfortunately, these challenges are not merely obstacles to applying to graduate school—rather, they are a hallmark of academia. Competitiveness festers in many scholarly environments. Rivalries inevitably form as academics vie for spots among research rankings, hoping for the rewards given to those who have authored the most publications amid a suffocating environment built on the principle of “publish or perish.”
Such a cutthroat culture anchors its roots early on in high school research subjects that require students to produce papers in an impossibly short amount of time, and, in many cases, lack the consultative approach or the appropriate experts to help deepen the content of their work. But for all of the academic rigor, many scholarly works never even make a meaningful mark on our communities. From locked library shelves lined with forgotten research projects to greedily paywalled journal articles, academic institutions consistently glorify the prestige of one’s name attached to a published work over the genuine expansion and propagation of knowledge.
Even the University, which takes pride as one of the nation’s leading research institutions, falls victim to these insufficiencies. A professor in my department, upon learning of my tentative plans to try a career in academia, encouraged me to look for more stable and lucrative opportunities abroad. While I appreciated his advice, especially since he mentioned some partner universities that facilitate exchange programs with DLSU, the caveat of having to leave the Philippines to find better employment sorely disappointed me, both for the heavy weight of its financial and emotional logistics.
It is not that I feel entitled to such prospects. It is that I want our country to be a place where opportunities can exist without scarcity.
These problems in the academe, albeit sounding abstract, do have “real-world” implications. Among them, functional literacy and reading comprehension have dipped to concerning rates, and local arts remain criminally undervalued. Native languages carrying rich heritages slip from the tongues of the youth amid their removal from the formal education system. In fact, subjects meant to foster appreciation for our own culture and contextualize relevant global issues threaten to be slashed from core curricula.
When looking at the bigger picture, it becomes clear that the stakes are collective, not personal. Ultimately, the issue transcends the question of whether or not I can find and sustain work after graduation. It reflects how the institutional devaluation of the humanities and liberal arts weakens our ability to fully engage in society, rather than being reduced to mere cogs in an employment machine. For us to reclaim such cultural and civic agency, the Philippines must learn to love its own not just for the sake of appreciation, but for invention and innovation—to the point of intellectual inquiry.
