Playing cat-and-mouse with higher education: CHED's GE curriculum faces knowledge and political economy hurdles

An opinion piece published in BusinessWorld examines the Commission on Higher Education's (CHED) reframed General Education (GE) curriculum, arguing that like many statist interventions, it suffers from both the knowledge problem and the political economy of reform.

The knowledge problem, as described by F.A. Hayek, refers to the difficulty centralized planners face in obtaining and processing the dispersed information needed to make effective decisions. Meanwhile, the political economy of reform highlights how government interventions often create incentives for further intervention, as policymakers respond to unintended consequences with additional regulations rather than allowing market-based solutions.

The piece concludes that these two factors generate a cumulative effect: an interventionist approach to education creates the conditions for further interventions ad infinitum, leading to a perpetual cat-and-mouse game between regulators and institutions.