The Congratulations Series
Here, I try to compute name popularity statistics from those who passed the 2022 licensure exams, except for the bar and the physicians' board which will be covered in Hall of Fame.
Why the licensure exams?
- Publicly available. I cannot stress this enough. We don't have an equivalent of the SSA database, and I doubt the statistics office will grant a random citizen's request for nationwide (or even local) baby name data (and maternal age and education data, and parental income data, and their ZIP codes, and...) without a semi-plausible reason (course requirement for statistics, perhaps). Thank goodness the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) allows for the online posting of passers' lists, and thank goodness parents and schools love to proclaim that their children and students passed or, even better, topped the exams.
- Large data sets. A single exam may be taken by thousands of hopefuls from all over the country. Of course, a large sample may still not represent the average, as The Literary Digest learned in 1936. As per the 2010 census, a college degree was the highest educational attainment of 15.9% of Filipinos aged 25 and older, with another 0.5% having postbaccalaureate education. These figures may have increased since then, but the simple truth is that college graduates are a minority. Not every college graduate takes a licensure exam, and not every examinee passes. Then consider the expense of tuition, and it's possible that the names of exam passers may reflect the tastes of parents who earn more and spent more years in school themselves. On the other hand, most people will have graduated from state colleges and universities because of the sheer number of campuses and lower fees, and even the children of the poor and less-educated have graduated from expensive schools before. So even if these samples might not represent the poorest, they may not represent the richest, either.
- Most examinees are first-time takers who graduated the same year. Thanks to the changes brought about by Republic Act 10533, the expected ages for graduating high school and college (assuming a four-year course and no delays) are now 18 and 22, respectively. Following this, the average board examinee in 2022 will have been born between 1999 and 2000. The meager PSA statistics I've found date only back to 2000, and the line graphs on Forebears where you can chart a name's popularity by jurisdiction stop at 1998 for the Philippines. This is my attempt to fill in that frustrating gap.
Structure of each post
Each post will cover one page and be divided into two main sections, one for women's names and another for men's names. In turn, each of those sections will have the following sub-sections:
- First given names.
- Second given names
- Third given names.
- Standouts. Lest I end up listing everyone whose names appeared only once, I will limit myself to seven names per section.