The first semester of the academic year 2007-2008 in the University of the Philippines (UP) was marked by the implementation of the tuition and other fee increase (ToFI). This caused a significant drop in the enrolment rate of incoming students. From the 3, 825 UPCAT passers, only 667 were able to enrol, and this number is expected to drop lower next semester, because some students, like Mikko, doubt that they will still be able to afford the P1,000-P1,500 per unit rate of UP education.

This creeping privatization of higher education in the Philippines is actually a global trend. College education in many countries such as Belgium and China has already been privatized under the “reform agenda on higher education” enforced through the states by powerful financial institutions, particularly the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

This education reform plan is a product of the neoliberal ideology which claims that all aspect of social life should be determined by the market. Neoliberalism is the revival of the liberal ideology applied not only in economics but in politics and the society as well. The main goal of neoliberals is to find new areas of marketisation. They accomplish this by removing trade barriers, reducing government spending for social services such as health and education, deregulating or lessening state intervention, and privatizing state agencies.

The effects of neoliberalism in the Philippine education was discussed during the launching of Mula Tore Patungong Palengke: A Neoliberal Education in the Philippines, a compilation of 25 critical essays written by personalities inside and outside the academe, on June 26 at the UP-Diliman Faculty Center.

Sarah Raymundo, who wrote the essay The Symptom Called Marketization, mentioned that in the Philippines, the objective of higher education has moved to align with the needs of the global market and away from the needs of the society. The proliferation of schools offering a degree in nursing, and the increase in the number of students taking this course is a concrete manifestation of this movement. The Philippine government promotes the production of world class and competitive nurses that it can export to other countries, first to pay the country’s foreign debt, and second, to mask its inability to provide jobs for its people.

But this set-up to promote the economy will only work for a short time, and will never solve the problems of the country, particularly the widespread poverty. More over, this attempt to mask the state’s failure to take care of its citizens will soon back fire because the exportation of Filipinos to other countries is draining the Philippines of brains and manpower. The country’s local hospitals, for example are in dire need of nurses, which is ironic since the Philippines is known as the primary exporter of nurses to the United States and European countries. By promoting nursing as the most in-demand and most lucrative profession, the country is slowly but steadily losing its pool of doctors, chemists, educators, and other professionals that supposedly ensure the survival of the society. Less and less students take up courses that do not promise immediate financial or monetary rewards. In UP-Diliman, the Department of Filipino has reported zero enrollees for the three courses it offers. There were also instances where professionals who graduated from courses other than nursing take nursing to be able to work abroad, such as the case of a medical board topnotcher just a few years ago.

Since English is the global language of business, part of the plan to produce exportable graduates is to promote the language as the medium for instruction. In his essay Philippine Education in Neo-colonial Period, Alex Remollino says that English, along with Math and Science, has been made a priority subject, while Filipino and History were pushed aside as miscellaneous subjects in primary and secondary education. This compromises the sense of nationality among Filipinos as it promotes the atmosphere of competitiveness and self-interestedness.

Even before ToFI was implemented, the plan to privatize UP, as well as other State Universities and Colleges (SUCs), was already seen in the diminishing support for education coming from the government. The educational institution is supposed to be receiving the bulk of the annual national budget, but yearly, the funds allocated for it becomes smaller and smaller.

Aside from the budget, Danilo Arao showed in Deregulation at the Expense of Quality Education that the number of public schools and SUCs in the country was also cut down. There were also plans of cutting down the number of SUCs from 111 to one per region only. This decline in the number of available public schools which offer free education has led to the increase in the number of out-of-school youths in the country, since they cannot afford the high price of private school education. Education, which most of the poor see as their way out of poverty, is fast becoming more and more unattainable for most of the Filipinos.

The marketisation of education will not stop with the tuition hike. In UP-Diliman for instance, the plan of a private corporation to build call centers and expensive dormitories in the university’s lands is already being carried out.

But the battle is not yet lost. Many students have already stated their disapproval of the creeping marketisation of higher education. In the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, for instance, around 6,000 students were able to impede the attempt to increase their tuition by 500 percent. Even the tuition increase in UP has hope: Bayan Muna representative Teddy Casino has filed a resolution to the Congress seeking to review its legality and effects.

The fight to stop the further marketisation of UP and other SUCs will be long and difficult. Victory against it will only be possible with the collective militant action by the students to remind the state that education is a right and not a privilege.

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