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LAST
week the Executive jolted everybody with the grandiose
announcement that state universities and colleges (SUCs)
have been ordered to freeze any tuition increase for the
new school year, as part of government efforts to ease
the burden of rising gas and food prices on the public.
The
intent was laudable, but the directive itself presented
problems.
First,
as pointed out by school officials, enrollment had been
all but finished in most schools, SUCs included, and the
students had already paid the new rates—in the schools
that hiked tuition, that is.
Second
problem: The order was arbitrary in the sense that, to
be fair, many SUCs really could use extra money to
improve their facilities, pay teachers better and take
other steps to improve the quality of the education they
offer. Not all of them have been able to convert some of
their assets into productive ventures, say, rent out
some of their space to private business in order to
raise funds for quality education.
Apparently recognizing these and other complicating
issues, the Alternative Budget Initiative (ABI) on
Monday called on the administration, in a press
statement, to go beyond having a moratorium on tuition
hikes in SUCs.
Instead,
said the civil-society alliance, the administration
“should seriously look into long-lasting solutions to
the problem among which are: an immediate stop to the
budget cuts on education; provide a monitoring scheme of
SUCs’ expenses and income-generation funds; halt the
flawed policy of creating more SUCs; and implement a
program for the strengthening and conversion of present
state schools into institutions of quality tertiary
education without succumbing to privatization and
‘rationalization’ schemes.”
Suggestions that, in our view, are right on the button
and comprehensively address the issues of access and
quality in higher education.
The ABI,
to be sure, is no fly-by-night civil-society group. One
of its leading lights is the SocialWatch Philippines
group of former national treasurer Leonor Magtolis
Briones, who teaches public administration in an SUC,
the University of the Philippines, and is also part of
the board of Silliman University.
Said
Mrs. Briones in a statement explaining the limitations
of a mere tuition freeze: “The government, as mandated
by the Constitution, should give priority to education.
The public higher-education system is suffering from a
lack of resource inputs and a defective governance
framework. Although there is a tendency to create more
state schools, this is more borne out of political
accommodation to politicians rather than a studied and
targeted response to the actual needs of tertiary
education.”
The ABI,
the group of nongovernment and people’s organizations
that pioneered civil-society engagement in the
Philippine national budget process, also urged SUCs to
be vigilant in the release of their budgets from the
national government.
Professor Briones’s group based its proposals on hard
government data: for one, the share of the national
government in SUCs’ financing has been steadily
declining from 85 percent in 2001 to 77 percent in 2005,
as schools are forced to shoulder their own expenses.
Consequently, per ABI, the SUC spending per student
declined by 23 percent from P17,000 in 2004 to P12,930
in 2006.
Youth
Against Debt, the youth arm of the ABI which led the
campaign for higher budgetary allocations for tertiary
education, echoed Professor Briones in saying that the
government should focus on strengthening existing SUCs
instead of building more public SUCs just to satisfy
patronage politics.
“The
direct result of building more SUCs to provide for the
popularity of government officials is a decrease in the
per-unit budget allocation to public higher education.
This compromises the absorptive capacity of the schools
and prompts the existing SUCs to conduct cost-recovery
and cost-sharing as a survival strategy.”
As a
result, SUCs “are compelled to devolve to the students
an increasing part of their financial and operational
burdens.”
It’s not
as if the government is helpless to act on the
situation. There is no reason, for instance, why it
cannot provide for increases in the budget for higher
education for 2008, as the ABI suggested. “Consistent
with the ABI budget proposals, this year’s national
budget allocates an increase of P340.29 million,
including P206.49-million increase in the budget of
state universities and colleges classified as Centers of
Excellence; P83.803-million increase in the budget of
noncenters of excellence state universities and
colleges; and P50 million for the construction of
National Center for Good Governance in the National
College of Public Administration and Governance at the
University of the Philippines Diliman.”
Among
the SUCs which received increases in their budgets for
2008 are the state universities of Bicol, Cagayan,
Bulacan, Benguet, Batanes, Quirino, Batangas and Partido.
The
Technological
University of the Philippines, Marawi State University-Tawi-Tawi
College of Technology and Oceanography and Adiong
Memorial Polytechnic State College also received
increases in their budget allocation.
So, when
it chooses to, the government can engage responsible and
knowledgeable members of civil society in the common,
daunting mission to improve tertiary education while
expanding access.
There’s
another ABI proposal, by the way: Amend/Repeal
Presidential Decree 1177 in Sec. 26 (B) Book 6 of the
1987 Revised Administrative Code or the Automatic
Appropriations Law for Debt Servicing—with the view to
cutting once and for all the Gordian knot that keeps
budget resources tied and unable to provide for truly
productive investments, such as human development, in a
globalized world where humanware is crucial to the
development of a country, and is the object of a
continuing talent war.
Of
course, the traditionalists in the government finance
circles will always point to the positive results of
having hewed closely, abjectly, to the will of
creditors, to the point of prepaying debt just to make
full use of currently favorable conditions. Yet, at the
end of the road, everyone will realize that nothing can
replace the most important resource of a country,
whether developed or developing: its people. Because of
this, the government should move beyond simple solutions
like tuition moratoriums and address the whole range of
problems afflicting higher education. |
