The high cost of higher education
Published in the online and print version of the Philippine Panorama.
https://newsbits.mb.com.ph/2017/06/04/the-high-cost-of-higher-education/
IN THE PHILIPPINES, finishing college has become the educational norm, compared to the past, when a secondary education was enough to be competitive in the job market. Nowadays, even post-graduate degree holders like lawyers, doctors, and those with masteral degrees face increasingly competitive job prospects anywhere.
But today, to even reach the doorstep of tertiary education is already a difficult task, even for those with the means to afford such an education. What more for majority of Filipino students who can only dream of studying in their college of choice?
To remain in college until graduation—to buttress the costs semester by semester, this, with the constant threat of tuition fee increase, is even harder.
Education on hold
Mia Mallari, 21, a business writer, was forced by financial circumstances to put on hold her journalism studies mid-way in 2015, and to work for her family instead.
Mallari started taking all sorts of jobs to ease their financial situation. Apart from this, she had two other siblings who were also at risk from pausing their education. Mallari would travel between Manila and her home in Cavite, costing her about R150 to R200 every day, to juggle various jobs and college.
“I knew our family’s financial state wouldn’t be sufficient for my current school’s costs, so I applied for a part-time job in a well-known call center in Makati. Even so, I had to cut down on units and drop some subjects which cost in the tens of thousands. I did this without actual consent from my parents. But, despite our financial handicap, my parents didn’t want me to transfer schools—we weren’t rich, but I was in a good school and they didn’t want to take that away from me,” Mallari said.
“But the regular tuition fee increases weren’t simple for me and my parents. I was part of the local scholarship program in our city and the R6,000 per semester they gave out felt like loose change. I had already applied for an SSS loan with my dad. The tuition I had to pay for four subjects cost as much as my tuition during my first semester in college. We borrowed money. My friends lent me money. They pooled in and lent me money without me asking. We did everything we could. I felt like I was falling behind my batchmates, but what led me on was how I was lessening the burden at home,” she added.
Many Filipinos are no stranger to Mia’s story—being forced by circumstances beyond their control to help their family. Like other manifestations of poverty and hardship, compromising education to focus on other priorities has become emblematic of the Filipino struggle.
But while it is truly awful that many students like Mia still have to go through these ordeals, it isn’t a surprise—college education is expensive, and continues to become even more out of reach of majority of Filipinos.
To understand what made education more expensive today more than ever, we must first understand why schools increase their tuition fees in the first place.
Derregulation and pre-need fiasco
Every year, the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) receives requests from private schools across the country for an increase of their respective tuition fees. CHED then either approves the requests of the private higher education institutions, or HEIs, by following the guidelines as laid down by CHED Memorandum Order 3 of 2012. (CMO 3-2012).
The memorandum states that the factors to be considered in accepting an HEI’s request for a tuition fee increase are (1) inflation rate of basic consumer prices both in regional and in the national level, and the level of poverty, (2) financial standing of the HEI, (3) financial capacity of the studentry, (4) the incidences of calamaties that may have affected the schools’ infrastructure, (5) the quality of education the school offers, which is subject to accreditation from bodies like the Philippine Accreditation of Schools, Colleges, and Universities (PAASCU), and the (6) mission-vision of the school. CMO 3-2012 is the most recent model of DO 68 s 1992 of the Department of Education (HEIs were under the Department of Education or DepEd at that time), which had first set the guidelines of tuition fee increase of the Education Act of 1982.
We then backtrack to the early ’80s. Ever since the promulgation of DO 68s 1992 in 1992, and then, its repealing version, CMO 13 s 1998, which were both pursuant to 1998 Pambansa Blg. 232, or the Education Act of 1982, the cost of education for the private sector had risen tremendously—at almost 20 percent per year, according to the Philippine Federation of Pre-Need Plan Companies, Inc.
(PFPPCI). In a policy brief prepared by the Senate Economic Planning Office in 2009, it states that in the 10 years after the implementation of DO 68 s 1992, “the cost of a four-year traditional educational plan increased 12 times—from R20,000 to R240,000,” meaning, prior to the said memorandum, tuition fees of HEIs were at an average of R2,500 per semester.Compare that now to the average R50,000-per-semester tuition fee that you would typically expect from a well-known HEI.
The Education Act of 1982 and its succeeding implementing rules and regulations gave private HEIs the benefit of increasing their own tuition fees with less oversight and rules from the government, as it was under Republic Act No. 6139, which capped annual increase in tuition fees at 15 percent from total fees.This deregulation of tuition fees, which unfortunately was coupled with the Asian Economic Crisis in the late ’90s, hit many students who aspired to move on towards the college level. Worse, it heralded the beginning of the end of the pre-need industry, which was pioneered by College Assurance Plan (CAP) in 1980.
Thousands of families subscribed to CAP in the past, and for good reason: it was simple—you pay a very small amount periodically to CAP, and when the benefactor graduates from high school, his entire college tuition is shouldered by CAP up until he or she graduates. The idea was that CAP will then invest the fund gathered from its obligees into other industries, which would then yield a higher return on investment (ROI) that is enough to pay off any kind of tuition and anticipate any kind of increase.
Unfortunately, CAP did not foresee the deregulation which happened in 1982, 1992, and 1998; and, eventually, in the ’90s and the early 2000s, the huge annual increases of tuition fees across the country had overwhelmed the ROI of CAP. Apart from this, many well-known HEIs have also become fiscally autonomous since the ’90s, making it more difficult for pre-need industries to keep up with their almost unbridled will to increase tuition fees.
Current financial struggles
Tuition fee increases are a response of a private HEI to a variety of factors, but the factor that has the most weight is the increase in the costs of goods in the market. This factor directly affects HEIs because an increase of goods results in a more competitive job market for academics like professors and instructors, who would probably seek out the best option available. In fact, CMO 3 s 2012 also states that 70 percent of proceeds to be derived from the increase shall be used for the increase in salaries of the teaching and non-teaching staff of the school.
But while the same memorandum virtually gives HEIs a free reign on how to determine their matriculation fees, especially considering the last two factors as stated in the memorandum, which are: (5) the quality of education of the school, (6) and the mission-vision of the school, both of which can be interpreted by non-statistical means, another requisite is that any increase should be consulted with the students involved, in order for students to understand if such increase is justified or not. Such is also the reason why students should be highly involved in their school’s politics.
Compromises and concessions
For Dennielyn Saludares, a marketing agent, college was a difficult time of compromises and concessions. Saludares is a communication arts graduate from a prestigious Catholic university in Manila, and the yearly costs of sustaining her education, more so with her other siblings, pushed her family to the brink.
“When I was young, I never thought I would experience a financially difficult situation, because I grew up with a self-sufficient family, but when my father got sick from intestinal cancer, that was when things started to become difficult. We had to divert funding for my father’s healthcare, and everything changed from there—our usual necessities became luxuries, and we were scraping at the bottom of the barrel just to get by. In college, I had thought of shifting to a more affordable school or even not study at all. I was a working student throughout my college years, and during those days our family was bearing the education of six people, including me,” Saludares said.
We also take into consideration the additional two years in senior high school (SHS), brought about by the new K-12 system. The DepEd reported last year, that there were about 1.3 million SHS students during the first ever year of SHS, 2016 to 2017. The first batch of graduates from SHS will be off by next year. This has put undergraduate colleges in a two-year gap until next year. In fact, several schools in Manila have withheld to offer some of their usual majors or degrees because of a huge lack of freshmen.
Out of the 1.3 million SHS graduatues, we have yet to know how many will pursue college. But considering the financial situation of most Filipinos like Mallari and Saludares, as well as the fact that students have already acquired more knowledge from their extended two-year stay in senior high, we expect that there will be fewer young Filipinos who will opt for college. If that happens, we might see the lowest college enrollment rate by next year.
Fits and starts
Jonalyn Saba, 26, had paused and continued her college education several times in the past due to financial difficulties. Saba is now a fourth year psychology student doing her on-the-job training, but a great deal of compromise and thinking was done before continuing her education.
“I needed to put off my personal needs and wants just to get by with my educational costs. There were a lot of things to consider, but it’s always trumped by my goal to finish school. But still I needed to work for my family. If there were other options, I would not have stopped, but in those times, I was the breadwinner. It wasn’t an easy decision, it was a great one, in fact, that I mulled over for almost a year. The hope of finishing was all I had. I even tried for a scholarship but I was denied [of it],” Saba said.
So, just how much is college education nowadays? In a matter of 10 years since 1992, undergrad tuition fees have risen by a staggering 2,000 percent from an average of R2,500 to R50,000 per semester.Since 2012, tuition fees have increased gradually. For school year 2013 to 2014, the increase per unit was 8.5 percent nationwide, and from 2014 to 2015, it was 8.13 percent. Additionally, from school year 2015 to 2016, it was 6.48 percent, and from 2016 to 2017, the increase was 5.41 percent. If, say, a unit cost R1,500 in 2013, and went through all the national increase rate, it would now cost R1,975, a total increase of 32 percent.
In the tens of thousands
Below is a table of the tuition fees of well-known HEIs (in no particular order) across the country, comparing Bachelor of Science (BS/BSci), Bachelor of Arts (BA, AB), and post-graduate courses per semester. This rate is for local students since tuition fees for foreigners are automatically and significantly higher.
For the majority of Filipinos, college education is a privilege and a luxury, not a basic right, which is why it is put off for a lot of priorities. It comes as no surprise, ever since the steep hike of education from the 1990s until the present, college education has become distant from even the middle class who once upon a time could easily afford it.
Global phenomenon
If it’s any consolation, this is not a Philippine phenomenon alone. Throughout the world, there is a trend of governments shifting its focus on other aspects of society like agriculture, infrastructure, and tourism at the expense of education.In the United States during 1970s, higher education and learning for state universities was almost completely subsidized by the state government, compared to today where student debt is a common thing for American collegians.
Why the gradual shift? Like the Philippines, countries have become increasingly competent and dependent on the world market, and education has become intertwined with this aspect—to be as competitive as any other industry.
This also means that any change in the economy is also a change in the education system, which has become largely privatized. With these economic changes like inflation, more costs mount for private HEIs who are doing their bid to secure a profitable niche in the competition.
But even in the presence of expensive private HEIs and underfunded state universities, the only way to exercise the strength of the people is through activism and resistance towards changes in the patterns of education—not only by writing reasons on the Internet on why there shouldn’t be incrases in tuition fees, but by going to the streets and marching towards Malacañang, CHED, or the DepEd to emphasize those reasons.
