This paper evaluates the implementation of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) K to 12 Adjustment Assistance Program, established following the full implementation of the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013 (RA 10533) in 2016, with the Senior High School (SHS) rollout. This had far reaching implications for the education stakeholders affected, including CHED. Specifically, the transition was expected to adversely affect higher education institutions and faculty and non-teaching staff due to non-enrollment to college of the first two SHS cohorts. But while this transition threatened HEI labor and sustainability, it also presented a rare opportunity to upgrade the country's higher education sector. A key agency in the reform, CHED established the K to 12 Transition Program to (a) provide assistance to the basic education sector, (b) protect higher education from losses, and (c) leverage the transition to make unprecedented investments in higher education. Under the program, CHED designed a number of individual and institutional grants, including Scholarships for Graduate Studies; Instruction, Research, and Sectoral Engagement; Institutional Development and Innovation Grants; and SHS Support Grants, among others. The transition likewise meant organizational and process adjustments in the CHED bureaucracy that encountered capacity challenges and related concerns. In effect, the program - already on its second year of implementation - has been facing low uptake, program dropouts, and a barrage of complaints stemming mostly from the delayed release of program benefits. It is within this context that the Program was evaluated. This process evaluation examines the aspects of implementation that have led to said challenges by assessing the program logic and its plausibility, service delivery and utilization, and program organization. This study finds that the Program has to be appreciated as a transition program itself, one wherein an innovative program, spurred by the need to recognize the imperatives of globalization and internal reform, required adjustments to and in the internal bureaucracies of CHED, long steeped in bureaucratic processes and routine, a positive variation of bureaupathology. This has meant the establishment of a transition office in CHED, an ad hoc Program Management Unit, that itself had to go through its own transition measures as it adjusted to the regular CHED bureaucracy. The study has surfaced many of the administrative challenges encountered in the implementation of the K to 12 program, most notably CHED's lack of absorptive capacity, which hindered smooth program implementation, thereby overshadowing the program's innovativeness and gains. Overall, CHED must (re)focus on the broader goal of the K to 12 Transition Program, which is to contribute to making Philippine higher education more globally competitive. It is imperative to redouble collective efforts to develop and design accompanying policies, plans, and strategies to attain this goal.
