Analysis

While effects of budget cuts to education are usually presented in the form of old or no facilities at all, there is a much more pressing effect that seems invisible to the eyes of the present Administration - the loss of democratic access.

Commercialization of the country’s state universities and colleges (SUCs) paves the way for continuous budget cuts, tuition increases and eventually the impossibility of an average Filipino’s pursuit of education.

In the University of the Philippines, for example, a new student would have to pay around 20,000 pesos (while the older batches would pay around 6,000 pesos for a 18-unit semester) at the start of the semester. He can opt to borrow from the student loan but he still needs to pay it before his first exam. He can also apply for STFAP or the Socialized Tuition Financial Assistance Program, but he’d be lucky if he gets assigned to the appropriate bracket. But then, the bracketing system itself is under inquiry. Then, if he hails from the provinces, he must also look for a place to stay in. The dormitories have increased their fees and boarding houses cost 1,500 pesos or more per month. To survive everyday, he must also find affordable places to eat in. But the continuous commercialization schemes of the UP administration are pushing the maninindas away from the campus through unaffordable rental fees.

This gives the new UP student a big financial burden to carry – that is, if he is able to enroll into UP first.

Now, not only brains are needed to get you into UP, but also magician-like penny-pinching or money-borrowing techniques.

As always, UP is not alone in such a situation. The image that the government is trying to portray is that all of us, from the individual citizen to the institutions, need to tighten our belts. So scrimp in social services and borrow all-out on big kickback projects like the NBN-ZTE?

At present, there is a huge campaign by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s administration to completely abolish the SUCs and the idea of subsidized public education.

The demolition job is headed by nation-wide implemented education policies that instead of increasing the quality of education, adds to the worsening crises in the country.

At the onset is the infamous Long Term Higher Education Development Plan. It aims to achieve the following by 2010:

• lessen SUCs by 20 percent
• “semi-corporatize” 6 SUCs
• make 20 percent of SUCs self-sufficient through the sale of intellectual products and grants
• have 50 percent of the SUCs engaged in income generating projects
• raise the tuition of 70 percent of the SUCs as high as that of private universities
• have 60 percent of SUCs collaborate with big industries and businesses

And of course there’s the CHED Memorandum Order No. 14 implemented in 2005 which allows the yearly increase in tuition without consultation if the increase is equal to or less than the inflation rate. Simply, it allows automatic tuition increase – the deregularization of education.

Another policy is the Medium Term Higher Education Development and Investment Plan (MTHEDIP). As the name suggests, it analyzes the education sector as an investment. According to the MTHEDIP, courses that are “non-sanctioned” by CHED would receive no funds from the government. There is also the proposition to implement a “regional university system” where only selected courses will be offered in certain universities.

The essence of state universities will surely suffer under these proposals. UP like other SUCs are the ones who should be offering courses of national significance. If courses can be “non-sanctioned” we can expect that those sanctioned are the ones that seem profitable to the government and the SUC administration – the technical courses that may produce researches with big companies, the service courses that may produce OFWs who will send remittances into the country.

Alvin Peters, the president of the National Union of Students of the Philippines had already said, “Philippine education is market-driven.” So instead of taking a course in Arts and Humanities (which are also of national significance) for example, a student who will be paying tuition that is comparable to private schools would choose to take a technical course that will land him a lucrative career in the future.

It is evident that the government is slowly liberalizing public education. The implementation of the said policies is their way of saying that they won’t be responsible for the right to tertiary education of the Filipino people anymore. The government cannot afford to support tertiary education when in fact, according to IBON Foundation, the corrupted money from the previous corruption scandals (“fertilizer fund scam, Jose Pidal bank accounts, Northrail project, the IMPSA power plant project, poll automation project and the Macapagal Boulevard project”) would be able to raise 7.3 billion pesos – money that could have been given to the Department of Education which at present is 8.43 billion pesos short of its intended budget.

The education sector is being commercialized – with the loss of budget as an excuse - at the expense of the youth’s democratic access to it.

In hindsight, while the UP administration is launching centennial projects that spell “commercialization” and “misappropriation” in big bold letters and corrupt officials are out in the streets scot-free, students and their families have to deal with the rising tuition and incidental costs of education. Much worse, vast numbers of the youth are out there, trying to make a living instead of exercising their right to education.

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