Special Project

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:

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.