College Education in Crisis

Five years from now, the Philippines’ tertiary education will likely face a crisis if the current trends in college enrolment and dropouts will continue. Due to continuing tuition hikes more and more students enrolled in private colleges and universities find themselves either dropping out or forced to transfer to state institutions.

By Carl Marc Ramota
Contributed to Bulatlat
(First of two parts)

Five years from now, the Philippines’ tertiary education will likely face a crisis if the current trends in college enrolment and dropouts will continue.

Citing recent studies, the Anak ng Bayan Youth Party revealed over the weekend that due to continuing tuition hikes more and more students enrolled in private colleges and universities find themselves either dropping out or forced to transfer to state institutions.

But the state universities and colleges (SUCs) are plagued by similar problems: Not only are they few now and their enrolment quotas limited, they are also haunted by increases in tuition and other fees thus forcing many state scholars to leave.

As a result, Raymond Palatino, vice president of Anak ng Bayan (nation’s youth) said, students who can no longer afford to study in expensive private tertiary schools and are planning to transfer to public higher education institutions may just have to give up their dream of earning a college diploma.

Palatino also predicted an upsurge in the rate of college dropouts and number of out-of-school youth in the coming school year, a situation that will worsen in 2010.

Recently, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) National Commission of the Philippines reported a measly 22 percent overall student survival from 1st to 4th year college. In June 2004, the Wallace report revealed that the dropout rate in college is at a staggering all-time high of 73 percent.

A similar study – a primer on the country’s education system - was made by the National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP) also in June last year.

Palatino said that access to public higher education institutions, which are the last resort for students who want to obtain a college degree, has become impossible to many college hopefuls. While it is true that SUCs offer a tuition lower than private schools, educational expenditures in state schools and universities have seen the biggest increases in recent years, thus making it also inaccessible to ordinary students.

Exodus from private school to public

A new report by the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) shows that the number of tertiary population in schoolyear 2002-2003 was 2.4 million compared to 1.87 million in 1994-1995. It cites however that while state institutions had their population soar by 415,972 (from 399,623 to 815,595 during the same period), private colleges and universities could only absorb an additional 139,357 enrolees (or from 1.472 million to 1.611 million).

It is true that in 1997, enrollment in private tertiary schools grew by 6.47 percent. By 2002 however the figure plunged drastically to a -2.8 percent. Enrollment figures in private schools fell by 46,354 in schoolyear 2002-2003 from 1,657,735 in the previous year.

The exodus of college students enrolled in private schools to state universities and colleges (SUCs) over the last two decades is also shown in other CHED records. In 1980, only 10 percent of college students were studying in SUCs. By 1994, the number went up to 21 percent and in school year 2002-2003, it already accounted for 34 percent of tertiary population.

Apparently, Palatino said, many college students have been going in droves to SUCs in recent years because of the incessant tuition and miscellaneous fee hikes in private schools as mandated by the Education Act of 1982.

This is aggravated by the low priority that government places on state education as manifested not only by constantly chopping down education budgets but also by reducing the number of public tertiary schools in the country. From 271 in 1996, the number of public tertiary institutions was down to only 173 by 2002.

As a result, enrollment figures in public tertiary schools have also seen a sharp decline since 1997, from a growth rate of 20.75 percent that year to only 0.9 percent by 2002.

Biggest tuition increase in SUCs

In recent years, the shift from public to private funding of SUCs has resulted in the jacking up of tuition and miscellaneous fees in all these institutions. The biggest increase in tuition took place in the Philippine Normal University (PNU) last 2003, from P10 to P50 per unit or 400 percent.

Ladderized tuition hikes are also ongoing in SUCs in Central Luzon and Bicol until 2006. The

Central Luzon State University (CLSU) plans to increase tuition and other fees by as much as 298 percent. Similarly, the Aklan Polytechnic Institute will implement a 400 percent tuition increase within four years, which effectively doubles tuition every year.

Most of these increases were the result of the imposition of a tuition scheme similar to the Socialized Tuition Fee Adjustment Program (STFAP) implemented in the University of the Philippines (UP) in 1989. Under the program, the UP tuition shot up by nearly 300 percent, from P11 to P300 per unit today. This scheme is also now being implemented in public technical and vocational schools in the country.

While some SUCs increased their tuition by more than a hundred fold over the last years, some feigned by pretending to maintain the same rates. What they did however was to increase miscellaneous fees as well as tuition in graduate schools.

At the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP), for instance, tuition remains at P12 per unit. But the same university has imposed a 67-100 percent hike in processing fees this school year. The biggest increase was for the fine for late enrolment, from P10 to P100. And there are new fees charged: for shifting form, verification of grades per subject, re-admission fee and change of subject or schedule.

Other SUCs such as the University of Northern Philippines in Vigan, Ilocos Sur and Samar State Polytechnic College in Eastern Visayas collect a P200 development fee.

In UP, laboratory fees in five departments and colleges have increased from P50 to P600. In its graduate schools, tuition increased in 2001, from P300 per unit to a maximum of P700, a 66.67 to 400 percent hike.

Anak ng Bayan Youth Party’s Palatino said that with educational services now being treated as a mere “commodity for trade,” educational institutions previously insulated from market forces due to relatively stronger state support in the past must from now on bow to the "harsh discipline of the market."

“By ‘privatizing’ institutions of higher learning, the state must now clamp down on the proliferation of non-viable campuses and course offerings,” he added. “Apparently, the ideal of ‘non-viability’ is not connected to any other concept than that of profitability.”

Paying scholars

Overall, Palatino said, expenditures for public education including tuition, lodging, food, transportation and books have soared in recent years. He cited the findings of the 1998 International Comparative Higher Education Finance and Accessibility Project of the University of Buffalo on Philippine higher education which reveals that a student in a local university or college (LUC) who lives with his or her parents needs at least P46,950 every semester. On the other hand, an iskolar ng bayan (state scholar) who lives as an “independent adult” will need as much as P101,650 a semester.

So now, most Filipino families can’t anymore afford to send their children even to public schools, especially given the stagnant wage level and declining income, he said.

Based on the 2003 Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES), the average Filipino family income went down by 10 percent compared to year 2000 figures. The inflation-adjusted average family income in 2003 fell to P130,594 in 2003 from P145,121 in 2000.

Province of the elite

The current crisis in tertiary education, Palatino said, should also be blamed on government’s policy of rationalization. The policy allows SUCs to be treated no longer as national agencies performing socially-oriented activities and hence entitled to government subsidy, but as income-earning entities.

“This further translates into incentives for money-making tertiary schools, thereby fully encouraging the commercialization of education,” Palatino said. “The policy has ensured corporate dominance even in public education, making tertiary education the province of the elite.”

He said government’s own education policies further inflate the ballooning uneducated population. “If it will continue its present thrust on education, the government will be driving more and more students out of school every year,” he said. Bulatlat