Instead, cooperation among educational agencies is being sought after especially by more affluent institutions in the First World which are initiating exchange programs between students and faculty of cooperating universities in different countries. More than exchanges, however, are funded cooperative programs among two or more institutions in a specific program usually at the graduate level where each institution contributes its strengths for synergy. The European Commission, the Japan Foundation, and private institutions such as the Ford Foundation, are encouraging such cooperative programs.

In the same vein, International Area Studies have once more claimed center stage so that universities in the West have established Asian Studies Program; in turn, in Asia, International Studies on North America, Latin America, and Europe have been initiated. These area studies usually involve curriculum focusing on language, culture, history, economics, politics, laws, and literature. Both in Asia and in the West, one-year studies abroad are being encouraged especially among students specializing in area studies and in the studies of different countries giving rise to European Studies, American Studies, Latin American Studies, Asian Studies – all under the general rubric of International Studies.

In this way, higher education students of different countries are preparing themselves to work not only within the context of their respective countries but to take on an international outlook and consciousness and be willing to work and thrive in a foreign country as part of the internationalization effort.

Even without these academic programs, the possibility of e-mail and Internet Services has made our people globally conscious with facilities for easy and immediate communication with all parts of the globe. Library resources have become available to the world of Internet, needing only mastery of an international language, in this case, English. There are likewise numerous organizations of universities of international character.

A two-edged sword

However, there are positive and negative aspects to globalization and internationalization, as some students of geopolitics and world economics have forewarned us.

The World Trade Organization is a fine concept but in joining WTO a country runs the danger of immiserating itself if it does not enjoy comparative advantage to be able to get a niche in the market for itself. In a poor country such as the Philippines, for example, free trade has made it possible to gain access to cheaper products but many of our own products (both agricultural and manufactured) are no longer competitive in the market because of countries such as China which are able to sell their products much cheaper. In the process, our own economic strategies have had to undergo drastic revision and we have to find new products which have comparative advantage to be able to earn precious reserves which we need for purchasing equipment for our own development.

In our country, for example, we have had to revive our dying agricultural industries to ensure that we can feed ourselves; in the field of manufacturing, we have yet to determine what we can do better than others. The indications are that we are competitive only in areas demanding quality manpower and service, such as tourism and overseas workers’ competence.

This once more puts a focus on education and our educational system which must stress language competence (English and other foreign language) and quality (in knowledge, attitude, and skills).

The positive aspect of globalization is the enrichment of the quality of life by having access to what is the best especially knowledge, science and technology, which will enable us to restructure ourselves for the demands of a knowledgeeconomy in this century.

The negative aspect insofar as education is concerned is that the re-emphasis on English has made our efforts to develop our national language take a back seat; we seem to be educating our population for the foreign market without taking care of our own needs, we are losing our talents and endangering our own future; we continue to be dependent on foreign expertise and have not really succeeded in indigenizing our curricula to be more functional for local needs instead of the global market.

Because of our own underdevelopment from an economic viewpoint, we cannot compete for our own talent and are losing them to the foreign market in a new kind of brain drain since the foreign market now needs not only our nurses and doctors and health professional workers but even our elementary school language and science teachers, our managers, our accountants, and we continue to lose our few PhDs.

The response of our academic institutions especially in the health professions

Focusing now on the topic of this paper, we have to face the problems that have arisen in the health professions and in the education of our health professionals in the light of this globalization.

In the short term, the absorption of our graduates in the health professions is a suitable short-term solution to the problem of unemployment (now estimated by the Department of Labor and Employment to be about 9 percent + and underemployment at 16 percent). In the short term likewise, the 8 million Filipinos abroad help our balance of payments and our economy by earning as much as US$8 + billion in 2002, with probably an additional US$2 + billion 2003.

From a demographic viewpoint, likewise, having 8 million Filipinos abroad not reproducing as rapidly as the 80 million Filipinos we have here (the growth in population is 2.36 percent) is helping us insofar as we have fewer people to support in this country.

In the longterm, however, we are endangering our future and will suffer the dire consequences of losing our talented youth who will not be available to us to help develop the country and bring about the needed social as well as political reforms that we need. Moreover, we are killing the goose that lays the golden egg by sending our best and brightest and best trained manpower abroad.

Those who go abroad are the self-starters, the people with initiative and leadership, thus depriving ourselves of the best and the brightest. Moreover, in the health professions, the first to go abroad now are faculty from our own educational institutions especially nursing and physical therapy. Who will teach the next generation of nurses and physical therapists since the faculty, as fast as we can train them for advanced degrees, leave us?

Among doctors, we are now able to train and retain talented ones, but the best and the brightest still manage to stay on abroad almost indefinitely, thus depriving us of the next generation of specialists.

We are really faced with a dilemma, since we have to offer our talents the latest in the health professions in terms of advanced knowledge and skills; for this we have to send them abroad, but in sending them abroad, many fail to return as they find better opportunities and more professional challenges in foreign lands. In training them, we lose them. In helping them take on an internationalized viewpoint and a global outlook, we seem to hasten their degrees from the land of their birth to help this land lift itself up by its own bootstraps. The latest irony is that the US is now recruiting Filipinos to teach Philippineaccented English to native speakers of English in the USA (especially California and Texas). One hundred years after the Thomasites arrived in the Philippines to teach us the English language, we have become the New Thomasites teaching Americans their own native language.

The implications of globalization are thus both negative and positive; positive in the results of a new consciousness beyond boundaries and a call for us to broaden our horizons and to learn to understand each other as now world citizens, negative however in the loss of the best and the brightest because of our lack of competitiveness and our lack of resources to be able to compete as equals, as partners rather than as aid-recipients.

Are there solutions to this dilemma?

None really, as far as I can see, but only palliatives that may provide some remedies hopefully until we can get more lasting remedies.

We need to overtrain. Since we have an excess of manpower, we can recruit many, train them well, hope that some will stay and that some will return if they see that there is a future here.

We can recruit the best and the brightest by having a systematic search for talent, a placement for scholarships and monitoring, guidance in post graduation choices, the invitation of companies to set up bases here so that these health professionals will maintain their roots here but have the opportunity to earn more in a system that we have for construction and technical workers in the Middle East and by our efforts to do software contracts here in the Philippines rather than abroad.

If we form partnerships with companies abroad, then we can have joint programs whereby our talented professionals can work both here and abroad in alternative systems, in the process, earning more than they do if they stay only in the Philippines.

For the health professionals, rather than lose them for the overseas market, why not establish the Philippines as a good retirement country (assuming that the present terrorist problem can be solved) and thus be able to pay our health professionals better by having foreign retirees here.

Conclusion

I hope that our cooperation and thinking together will provide fresh ideas on how we as people committed to moving this country will be able to survive and manage this new challenge of globalization especially its negative impact even as we enjoy its positive benefits.