EDCOM urges review of CHED manpower, organizational structure

The Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II) called for an immediate review and updating of the Commission on Higher Education’s (CHED) manpower and organizational structure.

EDCOM II revealed that the agency is severely incapacitated to monitor the quality of higher education institutions due to its outdated charter and critical staffing shortages.

In its Final Report, Turning Point: A Decade of Necessary Reform (2026-2035), the Commission highlighted extreme deficiencies in the agency’s regional monitoring capacity, where a single CHED staff member is expected to oversee hundreds of academic programs, rendering effective quality assurance mathematically impossible.

Each CHED Regional Office is manned by only 20 to 28 personnel (or an average of 25 based on the 398 total plantilla positions), despite its responsibility to monitor, evaluate, and ensure compliance of higher education institutions vis-à-vis minimum standards.

Nationwide, there are only 398 total plantilla positions in CHED Regional Offices tasked with supervising 37,443 programs, forcing the agency to rely heavily on contract of service personnel who lack the security of tenure and authority of permanent staff.

Data analyzed by EDCOM II exposes the depth of the crisis in the country’s most densely populated regions. In the National Capital Region, the CHED Regional Office only has 31 plantilla personnel. Against a backdrop of 6,899 undergraduate and graduate programs, this results in a ratio of just 1 staff to 223 programs. The situation is similarly dire in Region IV-A (CALABARZON), where 27 staff members must oversee 5,155 programs, creating a ratio of one to 191. In Region III (Central Luzon), the ratio stands at one staff member for every 139 programs, with only 25 personnel assigned to monitor 3,479 offerings.

The Commission attributes this "premature load-bearing" to the rapid expansion of CHED’s mandates without a corresponding increase in its organizational capacity. Since its creation under Republic Act No. 7722 in 1994, at least 164 laws and policies have been enacted that expanded the agency's responsibilities, particularly in student financial assistance and regulation. This includes regulatory authority (82 laws), financial service provider (35 laws), capacity development partner (67 laws), social policy implementer (70 laws), and education system integrator (19 laws).

As discussed in the EDCOM Final Report, while CHED’s budget increased by 633 percent from 2013 to 2023 largely due to the Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education Act, its staffing complement grew by only 22.7 percent over the same period. Thus, while the current organizational structure was designed primarily for policymaking, its day-to-day responsibilities has since included massive program implementation, as well as regulation duties for a continuously growing number of higher education institutions.

Notably, when CHED was established in 1994, the country had only 1,755 higher education institutions and 1.58 million student enrolment, 32 years hence, this has ballooned to 1,980 higher education institutions and 3.8 million students (academic year 2022-2023).

This severe manpower deficit has compromised the agency’s ability to ensure quality. Data submitted to the Commission showed that between 2022 and 2025, CHED was able to monitor only 13 percent of the programs targeted for review at the central level. Of those limited few that were monitored, a staggering 84 percent were found to have deficiencies.

EDCOM II Executive Director Dr. Karol Mark Yee emphasized that without sufficient boots on the ground, the government cannot effectively crack down on substandard programs or "diploma mills" that continue to operate despite poor performance in licensure examinations.

EDCOM has previously called on CHED to address the proliferation of diploma mills in teacher education, citing findings of Ateneo researchers that education-related graduate programs dominate enrollment nationwide, comprising 55.51 percent of all master’s and doctoral students, largely driven by DepEd promotion policies that award points for degrees regardless of the institution's quality,.

To resolve these bottlenecks, EDCOM II has filed the Higher Education Development and Innovation Act (House Bill No. 4958 and Senate Bill No. 1427) to update Republic Act 7722 of 1994, and to modernize the CHED Charter.

The proposed reforms seek to strengthen the agency’s development function, rationalize its structure to match its expanded mandates, and create additional plantilla positions specifically for quality assurance.

EDCOM II estimates that CHED requires at least 342 additional quality assurance officers to achieve 100 percent monitoring coverage of higher education institutions within three years, a necessary investment to ensure that the billions of pesos invested in free higher education translate into quality learning and gainful employment for Filipino graduates.