The new “development fee,” the former CHEd director narrated, all started a few years ago when some engineering schools found themselves unable to repay their World Bank loans due to high interest rates, thus forcing their students pay a "development fee."

Meanwhile, Ramirez pointed out that schools are collecting various fees for expenses that were supposed to be part of the school’s capital outlay and are already covered in the basic tuition. “These fees are not only questionable, they are superfluous. School owners are becoming more creative in inventing new fees to justify their lust for profit,” she said.

Among the most absurd fees that schools collect are the postal fee, insurance fee, Smart fee and copier fee in AMA Computer University; power charge fee in Trinity College; Power Plant development fee in Miriam College; Land Infrastructure Maintenance and Acquisition Development fee in Baguio Colleges Foundation; accreditation fee in Technological Institute of the Philippines; and pre-registration fee in Aquinas University in Albay.

Regulation?

CHEd has its own formula for solving the anomalous fees: Its new guidelines also put a cap on unabated miscellaneous fee increases. Similar to tuition, the cap will be based on the prevailing inflation rate. The country’s inflation rate last April is pegged at 8.5 percent.

However, CMO No. 14 also stipulates that tuition and miscellaneous fee increases that are less than or equivalent to the current inflation rate will not be subjected to consultation. Only increases that exceed the prevailing year’s average inflation rate shall require a consultation process.

NUSP’s Ramirez said the CHEd memo will only legitimize yearly hikes in miscellaneous fees. “School owners can automatically increase school fees of all sorts as long as it’s within the range of the inflation rate,” she warned.

Under the new memo, Ramirez said, school owners can legally increase miscellaneous fees for every item without any restraint as long as it is less than or equivalent to the country’s inflation rate.

“CHEd failed to recognize that miscellaneous fees don’t come in one package but are charged in separate items. Instead of regulating runaway school fee hikes, the new CHEd memo is even more vulnerable to abuse by school owners,” she said.

“Worse, CHEd has now declared legal the collection of dubious fees such as energy, development and insurance fees in its new guidelines,” Ramirez said.

“CHEd has also included vague items such as fees for ‘related learning experience’ and ‘study tours,’ which have already been exposed as a scheme for some teachers and school officials to earn money,” the NUSP leader said. “Instead of abolishing exorbitant fees, it seems that CHEd is allowing schools to collect more fees as the ‘other school fees’ definition in the new guidelines is indefinitely ended by the word ‘et cetera’ (etc.).”

Miscellaneous fee hikes in SUCs

Meanwhile, Anak ng Bayan Youth Party Vice President Raymond Palatino revealed that state colleges and universities (SCUs) are confronted with a similar trend. He said for the last years, SUCs experienced the biggest increases in tuition and miscellaneous fees due to meager budget.

Palatino expressed fears over CHEd’s new memorandum, saying the ambiguous provision on miscellaneous fees in CMO No. 14 will lead to bigger hikes in miscellaneous fees and the imposition of more exorbitant fees in SUCs.

“Since there is a moratorium on tuition hikes this year in SUCs and there are huge cuts in their budget, SUC administrators will likely increase miscellaneous fees and impose new fees to compensate for the meager budget,” he said.

“In recent years, the drastic shift away from public funding of colleges and toward private funding of these institutions resulted in the biggest increases in tuition and miscellaneous fee in public higher education institutions, particularly SUCs,” he added.

Palatino also revealed that some SUCs are collecting fees which are more expensive than their basic tuition per unit.

He cited the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) as an example. PUP tuition remains at P12 per unit or P252 for a student with a 21-unit full load. However, the school administration imposed increases in processing fees last school year. The biggest increase was for the fine for late enrolment, from P10 to P100.

Originally, a transcript of records (TOR) will cost a PUP student only P10. But with the new rates, he or she will now have to shell out P50 for each page of the TOR. On the other hand, a graduating student now has to pay P200 for graduation fee from only P50 in 2003.

PUP also charged new fees which include payments for shifting form, verification of grades per subject, re-admission fee and change of subject/curriculum/schedule.

NUSP’s monitoring meanwhile revealed that development fee is also being collected in some SUCs like the University of Northern Philippines in Vigan and Samar State Polytechnic College which collect P200 for the fee.

Laboratory fees have also been very profitable for SUC administrators. In five departments and colleges in UP, laboratory fees have increased from 0-P50 to P500-P600.

Tuition in UP graduate schools also increased in 2001, from P300 per unit to a maximum of P700, a 66.67 to 400 percent hike.

“Unless the government and CHED start to genuinely regulate miscellaneous fees, any tuition hike moratorium will be useless as school administrators can easily bloat other fees to rake in big profits,” he said.

Palatino also urged CHEd to abolish exorbitant fees being charged in schools and penalize schools which will continue to impose questionable fees on students. Bulatlat

© 2004 Bulatlat ■  Alipato Publications

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