There is no single official catalogue of "all college courses in the Philippines." Any list that claims to be one is either a snapshot of a few big universities or an invention.
What exists instead is four separate things, and knowing which one you are looking at saves a lot of wasted effort:
- The set of CHED Policies, Standards and Guidelines — the programs CHED has written standards for, published as memorandum orders.
- The programs an individual school is authorised to offer, which is a much shorter list and is campus-specific.
- CHED's discipline groups, used for statistics rather than admissions.
- The marketing name a school gives a program, which may match none of the above.
This guide covers where each one lives and how to check the only list that actually matters to you: the one for the school you are considering.
The real master list is the CHED memorandum orders
CHED issues Policies, Standards and Guidelines (PSGs) one program or program family at a time, and publishes them by year. Scanning a single year gives you a feel for the granularity. From the 2025 batch alone:
- Bachelor of Science in Manufacturing Engineering (CMO No. 16)
- Bachelor of Engineering Technology (CMO No. 20)
- Associate in Radiologic Technology (CMO No. 4)
From 2024:
- BS Public Health, with separate Population and Clinical tracks (CMO No. 1)
- BS Meteorology (CMO No. 3)
- BS Physics and BS Applied Physics (CMO No. 13)
- Master in Nursing Education (CMO No. 5)
- Graduate programs in Women and Gender Studies (CMO No. 8)
Two things follow from this. First, the catalogue is not static — new degrees get standards written for them every year. Second, a program family often shares one CMO: the computing degrees BS Computer Science, BS Information Systems and BS Information Technology were covered together by CMO No. 25, series of 2015.
If you want to know whether a degree really exists as a Philippine degree, this is the place to check. We cover how the whole system fits together in how college programs are organised.
Programs can exist without a PSG
A degree missing from the CMO list is not automatically fake. CHED's published service catalogue includes a specific route for "Programs Without Existing Policies, Standards and Guidelines (PSGs)."
Those applications go through a heavier two-phase process — the regional office evaluates the school and issues a certificate of eligibility, then the Office of Programs and Standards Development brings it to the relevant Technical Panel and to the Commission en banc for approval. It is the same track used for graduate programs, Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing, Engineering, BS Marine Transportation and BS Marine Engineering.
Practical consequence: if a school is offering something unusual, the right question is not "is there a CMO for this?" but "what authorisation do you hold for this program, and for this campus?"
Not everything at a university answers to CHED
The word "course" hides three different regulators:
| Type of program | Regulator |
|---|---|
| Most degree programs | CHED |
| Law (JD and related) | Legal Education Board |
| Maritime programs | CHED with MARINA |
| Technical-vocational qualifications (NC I–IV) | TESDA |
CHED's own permit and recognition service explicitly carves out "those under the Legal Education Board (LEB)." So a university offering a law program and a computing program is operating under two different regulators for those two programs.
How CHED groups programs
For statistics, CHED collects data from every HEI through its Higher Education Management Information System, mandated by CMO No. 45, series of 2016, and reports enrolment and graduates by discipline group. Groups named in CHED statistical bulletins include:
- Education Science and Teacher Training
- Business Administration and Related Courses
- Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries
- Architecture and Town Planning
- Engineering and Technology
- Maritime
- Law and Jurisprudence
These groupings are worth knowing because they are how official enrolment data is reported, and because they show which fields are crowded. In CHED Caraga's AY 2023-2024 bulletin, for example, Education Science and Teacher Training was the most commonly offered discipline in the region, offered by 45 HEIs, followed by Business Administration Related Courses at 42 — while Maritime and Architecture and Town Planning were offered by three HEIs each, and Law and Jurisprudence by one.
That pattern — teaching and business everywhere, specialist fields concentrated in a handful of schools — repeats across the country and is the single most useful thing to internalise when you are choosing where to study a niche program.
What Filipinos actually enrol in
A 2025 Philippine Institute for Development Studies review, using data from CHED's Office of Planning, Research and Knowledge Management covering AY 2018-19 to AY 2022-23, identified the ten most-subscribed undergraduate programs:
- BS Business Administration — the highest-enrolment of the ten
- BS Criminology — second
- Bachelor of Secondary Education — third
- BS Tourism Management and BS Hospitality Management
- BS Computer Science, BS Information Systems and BS Information Technology
- Bachelor of Elementary Education
- BS Nursing
- BS Civil Engineering
- BS Accountancy
- Bachelor of Industrial Technology — the lowest-enrolment of the ten
Note how narrow that is. Ten program families absorb the bulk of Philippine undergraduate enrolment, which is why the same handful of course names appears on almost every school's brochure. If you want something outside this set, expect fewer schools, fewer sections, and a shorter list of places to compare. Our guides to in-demand courses and what course to take go into the demand side.
Why the same course looks different at two schools
Because CHED prescribes minimum outcomes and a minimum unit count, not a course list. The standards say so directly — HEIs "are allowed to design curricula suited to their own contexts and missions provided that they can demonstrate that the same leads to the attainment of the required minimum set of outcomes, albeit by a different route."
Three consequences you will meet in real brochures:
- Majors and specialisations are mostly the school's call. Two BSBA programs can offer completely different major tracks.
- Total units differ. The PIDS review notes that "the norm is for institutions to exceed minimum credit requirements," so a school's actual prospectus is usually heavier than the CMO minimum.
- Degree titles diverge. A subject can be a whole degree at one school, a major at another, and an elective at a third.
That last point catches people out badly when a field does not exist as its own Philippine degree — advertising and public relations, for instance, are taught inside communication, business and fine arts degrees under a range of different conferred titles rather than as one standard degree.
Courses that come with a licence attached
One split cuts across every discipline group: whether the program feeds a licensure exam. The PRC lists 46 Professional Regulatory Boards, each covering one regulated profession.
This changes the program itself, not just what happens after graduation. Licensed programs carry mandated clinical or internship hours, prescribed laboratory equipment, and CHED performance sanctions tied to board results. Our complete list of courses with board exams maps the 46 boards to their feeder degrees.
How to get a real list for a real school
Skip the aggregator sites. In order:
- Start with the school's own program pages, not a directory. Directories go stale and copy each other.
- Ask the registrar for the current program offerings for the campus you would attend. Programs are authorised per campus, and extension campuses often offer less than the main one.
- Ask what authorisation each program holds — permit, recognition, or COPC — and for which year levels.
- Get the prospectus, not the brochure. The prospectus lists actual courses and units per semester.
- For licensed programs, ask for board performance. Schools that are proud of it will tell you immediately.
We publish per-school course guides built this way, straight from each school's own published program pages — for example UP Diliman and PUP. Where a school does not publish a full list, the honest answer is that the list is not public, and the registrar is the only reliable source.
The short version
The Philippines does not have one course catalogue. It has a growing set of CHED standards, a separate route for programs those standards do not cover, several regulators, and roughly ten program families that most students actually enrol in. Verify at the level of the individual campus and the individual program, and treat any national "complete list of courses" as a starting point for questions rather than an answer.
Sources
- Commission on Higher Education, 2025 CHED Memorandum Orders — https://legacy.ched.gov.ph/2025-ched-memorandum-orders/
- Commission on Higher Education, 2024 CHED Memorandum Orders — https://legacy.ched.gov.ph/2024-ched-memorandum-orders/
- Commission on Higher Education, Citizen's Charter, permit, recognition and COPC services — https://caraga.ched.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Updated-CHED-Citizens-Charter.pdf
- Commission on Higher Education Caraga Regional Office, Statistical Bulletin AY 2023-2024 — https://chedcaraga.ph/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/STATISTICAL-BULLETIN-AY-2023-2024-Hires.pdf
- Philippine Institute for Development Studies, "Review of CHED Policies, Standards, and Guidelines (PSGs) Pre- and Post-K to 12 Reforms," Discussion Paper Series No. 2025-13 — https://pidswebs.pids.gov.ph/CDN/document/pidsdps2513.pdf
- Commission on Higher Education, CMO No. 13, series of 2021, Associate in Computer Technology — https://legacy.ched.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/CMO-No.-13-S.-2021.pdf
- Professional Regulation Commission, Professional Regulatory Boards — https://www.prc.gov.ph/professional-regulatory-boards
