Marcos rebrands foreign students committee to market Philippine schools abroad

MANILA, Philippines – The Philippines is making a fresh push to attract international students, with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. ordering agencies to market local universities abroad and simplify how foreign students enter the country.  

Executive Order No. 124, signed September 8, creates the "Education Philippines" (EduPhil) program under the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) and tasks it with developing a five-year "international education promotion strategy."

The order gives EduPhil three aims: to promote Philippine universities abroad through research and academic partnerships, speed up the entry of foreign students, including the processing of student visas, and help schools recruit and support them. 

The order says the country needs agencies working together on one digital system to compete as a destination for study and research.

The order converts the Inter-Agency Committee on Foreign Students, created under EO 285 in 2000, into the "EduPhil Task Force."

The task force will be chaired by CHED, with the Department of Foreign Affairs serving as vice chair. The other members are the Bureau of Immigration, the Department of Information and Communications Technology, the Department of Tourism, the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency and the Professional Regulation Commission.

Foreign students looking to enroll in a Philippine university or college currently go through separate agencies at each stage of their application.

The student first needs acceptance from a school. The DFA then authorizes a Philippine embassy or consulate to issue the visa. After arriving, the student must register with the Bureau of Immigration for an alien registration card, and student visa holders must report to immigration every year. 

The order directs the task force to build an EduPhil Portal, a single online system where agencies will process documents, school endorsements, clearances, permits and visas, and refer cases to one another.  

The task force must also draft a five-year promotion strategy that will make "the EduPhil brand" the government's "official identity" for courting more students to enroll in universities and colleges here. 

It must also propose agreements with other countries to recognize each other's degrees and professional credentials.

The order allocates no new funds. CHED and the member agencies will cover initial costs from their current budgets.

Understaffed CHED. EDCOM 2's final report released in January found that CHED only has 398 plantilla positions in its regional offices to oversee 37,443 degree programs. 

From 2022, CHED reviewed only 13% of all degree programs scheduled for monitoring, and 84% of those showed deficiencies.

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