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July 5, 2000

Along with the economic crisis, we also face the issue on education, which has long been sidetracked. The education budget is lagging behind despite the mandate for it to have the lion’s share. As the Commission on Higher Education [CHEd] has resigned to their ignorance and has complacently admitted that they are useless in solving the issue on tuition increases.

Meanwhile, a new Commission is taking center stage, the Presidential Commission on Educational Reforms [PCER]. This Commission, tasked to recommend measures to the Executive body, for it to save up on its budget, recently issued nine recommendations that justified the student sector’s fresh struggle.

One of the nine recommendations includes the introduction of the proposed scheme for re-orienting the premises for financing higher education which includes the scheme for increasing revenues by raising tuition fees. They claim that increasing tuition rates is acceptable as it can be subjected to future adjustments or amendments if the schemes will deem unfit.

Reading between the lines, it means educational institutions will just have to learn from the experience of the implementation; meaning we can implement it and if something goes awfully wrong then we can all just charge it to experience.

The students cannot afford this kind of set up as this puts us in the losing end of the bargain. If the Commission cannot study it thoroughly with the consideration of its effect to students and parents, then they should not recommend it. We all know that flaws in the policies in education are very hard to undo.

Also included in the recommendation is the finalization of the rationalization plan for public higher education that proposes the establishment of guidelines for the creation, conversion, expansion, privatization, merging, or phase out of State Universities and Colleges (SUCs), poising to commercialize education.

The institutionalization in each SUC, a recommended scheme of cost recovery and maximum utilization of assets to augment their operating and capital outlay budgets was also included in it. It urges the SUCs to adopt the same principles of the UP socialized tuition fee scheme, "where students coming from financially-capable families shall pay the larger share of the cost or tuition structure."

This means the government will oblige financially capable students to shoulder the school expenses of indigents rather than the government subsidizing them. Schools will be self-sufficient at the expense of the students. Analyzing what has been practiced in UP, we can safely say that the Socialized Tuition Fee Adjustment Program or the STFAP, to which the recommended program is patterned, has bred problems rather than solutions. From the bracketing to the transparencies of the procedure, STFAP has remained to be big issue that UP students continue to struggle against.

In the utilization of assets, the UP administration has once tried entering to such measures through the Commonwealth Property Development Plan [CPDP], which created such raucous negative reactions from the entire UP community that it was ceased. It was the main issue why students poured out the streets in the 1997 SONA and demanded that this designed deal be shelved.

Also part of the recommendation is the preparation and implementation of business or development plans relative to the use of idle lands and properties. This implies that they will put up their assets for lease to private institutions. While it is common knowledge that the primary concern of the private sector is to gain profit, this recommendation subjects our SUCs to further exploitation.

Finally, they recommended an additional budget cut for SUCs. They see it fit that SUCs become self-sufficient. Their efforts to find ways to subsidize their operations may lead them to privatization and commercialization.

The Commission have recommendations that they think will help the common masses but instead they justified what the private sector’s commodification of education. Worse, they intend to follow suit. Nevertheless, the Commission does not lead to a more productive output of improving the quality of our education nor making education accessible rather it gave recommendations to lessen Government’s expenditures in education.