The “socialized” tuition program in UP has always been an apology of sorts. Its self-styled mission to “subsidize the deserving” is a roundabout way of saying that because there’s not enough to go around – so some will have to pay more.
Introduced in 1989 as a means to democratize UP education, it was met with stinging criticism when it effectively raised the flat tuition of P40 to a base of P300 per unit. The minimum wage that year was P89. The buzz word floated then was “accessible”, obsoleting the word “affordable”. UP restructured the program for inflation seventeen years later, and pegged base tuition at P1,000 per unit. The minimum wage for industrial work marginally rose from P350 in 2006 to P456 today.
The basic argument that justifies charging higher fees is that somehow, there are those who can afford it. I’ve sat in dialogues with three UP presidents, and I’ve heard this rationalization rehashed many ways and with different premises – student demographics is changing, look at the parking lots.
Last school year when I was student regent, the obstinate declaration was everyone is still subsidized. Creating a millionaires’ bracket was meant to minimize government support to those who can well pay full price. But since when has subsidizing the rich become mutually exclusive to the ideal of subsidizing the smart?
Maintaining a free-tuition bracket is the program’s acknowledged saving grace. Whenever the demand to scrap the socialized tuition scheme escalates, the other side taunts that free tuition and stipends will go away with it. It’s frustrating to argue, with those too wrapped up in the program, that financial aid can exist outside of the program.
In reality, qualifying for those brackets with perks is a tedious, miserable process. The lines are long, the requirements are substantial, and all too often, the system too convoluted to understand in one go. Qualifiers are announced midway through the semester;and until then every day is a waking agony.
I know this is due to a mix of bureaucratic inefficiency and policy weakness. To be fair, UP conducts stakeholders’ workshops. I’m thankful that the staff last year sat through with an open mind to my presentation of students’ issues, especially those about blithering and inconsistent guidelines. In turn, we students took note of a capacity audit byscholarships offices, where they said needed more staff, more space, more computers.
Administratively, it really is hard to assign brackets. There’s a computer program that processes and regresses indicators, but someone still has to write down what to feed in. The indicators are sometimes confusing for both the applicant and the evaluator, which is why the measure of satisfaction is set against the number of student appeals – nevermind the many students who are too disheartened to fight on.
Serious appeals are raised to university committees, on different levels, where every discussion is a heart-rending experience. It’s an endless slideshow of rickety houses and backyard toilets, computations of utility bills, and probing questions into other families’ lives. I leave these meeting thoroughly haunted by poverty up close, and disturbed that we can decide who gets what by comparing circumstances. Who were we to say that this one deserves stipends more than the other? To deal with the disquiet I and other student members early on resolved to always vote for the lowest possible tuition.
I’ve lost my composure over many stories and rules that I felt were unfair. One all-too honest student checked the box for swimming pool, because they did have the inflatable kind. Another marked yes, they had a security guard, but there was no space in the application form to explain that tatay worked as one. In both cases, they would have been automatically considered millionaires if the matter was not immediately corrected by the staff.
One time the committee followed a rule that we can go no lower than what the student asked for, ergo what he claimed he could pay, despite statistics otherwise. At the next assembly it became clear that there was no such rule under the restructured scheme. I lost the demand to reverse at least two previous affected cases. We agreed to collate and codify the rules for appeal thereon – an implicit admission that we weren’t being strictly guided by any.
But without the chance and authority to critically review of the program itself, these workshops and meetings can only end up only with a round of trivial pledges. The students can only promise to submit complete and accurate documents earlier, the staff to take anger and stress management lessons, and the administration to furnish the lacking resources.
It’s easy to show that the scheme is, as students leaders have said time and again, a smokescreen for tuition fee increase. The final tuition collection from all enrolees is right there, tallied in the government accounting. No one has dared deny that income from student fees has grown through the years. In fact it has become a reliable and liquid money source that more or less half of maintenance expenses are programmatically taken from the tuition fund. UP’s meager government appropriations are usually channelled to personnel salaries and capital outlay. Put rather crudely, the state pays for the teachers and the buildings, but the students pay for electricity, water, janitorial and security services, and other routine expenses to keep the school running from day to day.
Bottomline, UP has had to raise money on its own because its share from the collective pool for social services isn’t enough. All the more UP needs to seriously review the philosophy of its tuition system, in connection with its registration, scholarships, and loan schemes. Taking from the students is a lazy – and immoral – way out.
I don’t want to hear any more of a friend who had to sell at least 30 slap watches during finals month. Her bracketing appeal had been rejected, making her accountable for P4,500 more than she expected, and because it was already October the loan board was closed. I don’t want to deal with the emotional fall-out from any more suicide, prosti-tuition, and drop out tales, when there’s too much work to do.
It’s time to turn around the attitude: relax payment rules, encourage and grant more scholarships and stipends, indulge in more student-friendly policies. It’s imperative to roll back the base tuition to more affordable rates, to a price that even the probinsyano farmer can reasonably manage. Pushed between the devil and the deep blue sea, it may be time to critique constructively, suggest reforms, if only to broker small victories and relieve some current crisis.
But at heart, the socialized tuition program is social stratification that only highlights and exacerbatesthe Philippine class divide. Extra effort is required from the have nots. The program is still twinned with student assistantships, so those who need extra money can earn up to P2,500 in exchange for 100 hours of work per month. Meanwhile, everything is ready for the picking by the haves. I’ve heard about the parent last enrolment who, hopefully without malice, insisted on a special express line because she was paying top fees. As long the odds are not even and the opportunities not fair, education can never be a means for social equality.
I don’t believe that sipag and tiyaga can singularly and spectacularly solve poverty, where exploitation is systematic. There are factory workers who work double-shifts, laundry women who scour their hands raw only to bring home a fraction of what I, an intellectual worker, can earn with a few flicks of the mind. And everybody knows that marrying a haciendero is a more straightforward way to get rich.
Socialized tuition in a pre-industrial, Third World country is an irony and an apology. UP is trying to remedy a burning social ill in a narrow dimension: make one pay for the other. Other schools are poised to follow suit, oblivious to the point that UP hasn’t exactly achieved equity and justice with its own experience.
If this was any other thing and I had the means, I will gladly shell out for my share and then some. But this is education – there’s no way to put a price on it, save if you subscribe to the mentality of commercializing rights. Perhaps when I’ve lost my moorings, when my eyes glaze over and my back is broken, I will shrug my shoulders like Noynoy Aquino and say, there’s nothing I can do.
There are still many of us who haven’t lost hope and believe the system can be changed. We’re coming together in anger, in spite, in solidarity. We’re growing smarter and more soulful connections, learning to dispel despair even as we are barraged with so much information. What better time than now, smack in election season, when everyone is challenged to imagine the future they want for this country. Consider yourselves warned: we’re going to browbeat everybody to give free education for all.
Krissy Conti is former student regent of the University of the Philippines.
Original published on The Philippine Online Chronicles http://thepoc.net/component/k2/18058-why-ups-socialized-tuition-fails
Introduced in 1989 as a means to democratize UP education, it was met with stinging criticism when it effectively raised the flat tuition of P40 to a base of P300 per unit. The minimum wage that year was P89. The buzz word floated then was “accessible”, obsoleting the word “affordable”. UP restructured the program for inflation seventeen years later, and pegged base tuition at P1,000 per unit. The minimum wage for industrial work marginally rose from P350 in 2006 to P456 today.
The basic argument that justifies charging higher fees is that somehow, there are those who can afford it. I’ve sat in dialogues with three UP presidents, and I’ve heard this rationalization rehashed many ways and with different premises – student demographics is changing, look at the parking lots.
Last school year when I was student regent, the obstinate declaration was everyone is still subsidized. Creating a millionaires’ bracket was meant to minimize government support to those who can well pay full price. But since when has subsidizing the rich become mutually exclusive to the ideal of subsidizing the smart?
Maintaining a free-tuition bracket is the program’s acknowledged saving grace. Whenever the demand to scrap the socialized tuition scheme escalates, the other side taunts that free tuition and stipends will go away with it. It’s frustrating to argue, with those too wrapped up in the program, that financial aid can exist outside of the program.
In reality, qualifying for those brackets with perks is a tedious, miserable process. The lines are long, the requirements are substantial, and all too often, the system too convoluted to understand in one go. Qualifiers are announced midway through the semester;and until then every day is a waking agony.
I know this is due to a mix of bureaucratic inefficiency and policy weakness. To be fair, UP conducts stakeholders’ workshops. I’m thankful that the staff last year sat through with an open mind to my presentation of students’ issues, especially those about blithering and inconsistent guidelines. In turn, we students took note of a capacity audit byscholarships offices, where they said needed more staff, more space, more computers.
Administratively, it really is hard to assign brackets. There’s a computer program that processes and regresses indicators, but someone still has to write down what to feed in. The indicators are sometimes confusing for both the applicant and the evaluator, which is why the measure of satisfaction is set against the number of student appeals – nevermind the many students who are too disheartened to fight on.
Serious appeals are raised to university committees, on different levels, where every discussion is a heart-rending experience. It’s an endless slideshow of rickety houses and backyard toilets, computations of utility bills, and probing questions into other families’ lives. I leave these meeting thoroughly haunted by poverty up close, and disturbed that we can decide who gets what by comparing circumstances. Who were we to say that this one deserves stipends more than the other? To deal with the disquiet I and other student members early on resolved to always vote for the lowest possible tuition.
I’ve lost my composure over many stories and rules that I felt were unfair. One all-too honest student checked the box for swimming pool, because they did have the inflatable kind. Another marked yes, they had a security guard, but there was no space in the application form to explain that tatay worked as one. In both cases, they would have been automatically considered millionaires if the matter was not immediately corrected by the staff.
One time the committee followed a rule that we can go no lower than what the student asked for, ergo what he claimed he could pay, despite statistics otherwise. At the next assembly it became clear that there was no such rule under the restructured scheme. I lost the demand to reverse at least two previous affected cases. We agreed to collate and codify the rules for appeal thereon – an implicit admission that we weren’t being strictly guided by any.
But without the chance and authority to critically review of the program itself, these workshops and meetings can only end up only with a round of trivial pledges. The students can only promise to submit complete and accurate documents earlier, the staff to take anger and stress management lessons, and the administration to furnish the lacking resources.
It’s easy to show that the scheme is, as students leaders have said time and again, a smokescreen for tuition fee increase. The final tuition collection from all enrolees is right there, tallied in the government accounting. No one has dared deny that income from student fees has grown through the years. In fact it has become a reliable and liquid money source that more or less half of maintenance expenses are programmatically taken from the tuition fund. UP’s meager government appropriations are usually channelled to personnel salaries and capital outlay. Put rather crudely, the state pays for the teachers and the buildings, but the students pay for electricity, water, janitorial and security services, and other routine expenses to keep the school running from day to day.
Bottomline, UP has had to raise money on its own because its share from the collective pool for social services isn’t enough. All the more UP needs to seriously review the philosophy of its tuition system, in connection with its registration, scholarships, and loan schemes. Taking from the students is a lazy – and immoral – way out.
I don’t want to hear any more of a friend who had to sell at least 30 slap watches during finals month. Her bracketing appeal had been rejected, making her accountable for P4,500 more than she expected, and because it was already October the loan board was closed. I don’t want to deal with the emotional fall-out from any more suicide, prosti-tuition, and drop out tales, when there’s too much work to do.
It’s time to turn around the attitude: relax payment rules, encourage and grant more scholarships and stipends, indulge in more student-friendly policies. It’s imperative to roll back the base tuition to more affordable rates, to a price that even the probinsyano farmer can reasonably manage. Pushed between the devil and the deep blue sea, it may be time to critique constructively, suggest reforms, if only to broker small victories and relieve some current crisis.
But at heart, the socialized tuition program is social stratification that only highlights and exacerbatesthe Philippine class divide. Extra effort is required from the have nots. The program is still twinned with student assistantships, so those who need extra money can earn up to P2,500 in exchange for 100 hours of work per month. Meanwhile, everything is ready for the picking by the haves. I’ve heard about the parent last enrolment who, hopefully without malice, insisted on a special express line because she was paying top fees. As long the odds are not even and the opportunities not fair, education can never be a means for social equality.
I don’t believe that sipag and tiyaga can singularly and spectacularly solve poverty, where exploitation is systematic. There are factory workers who work double-shifts, laundry women who scour their hands raw only to bring home a fraction of what I, an intellectual worker, can earn with a few flicks of the mind. And everybody knows that marrying a haciendero is a more straightforward way to get rich.
Socialized tuition in a pre-industrial, Third World country is an irony and an apology. UP is trying to remedy a burning social ill in a narrow dimension: make one pay for the other. Other schools are poised to follow suit, oblivious to the point that UP hasn’t exactly achieved equity and justice with its own experience.
If this was any other thing and I had the means, I will gladly shell out for my share and then some. But this is education – there’s no way to put a price on it, save if you subscribe to the mentality of commercializing rights. Perhaps when I’ve lost my moorings, when my eyes glaze over and my back is broken, I will shrug my shoulders like Noynoy Aquino and say, there’s nothing I can do.
There are still many of us who haven’t lost hope and believe the system can be changed. We’re coming together in anger, in spite, in solidarity. We’re growing smarter and more soulful connections, learning to dispel despair even as we are barraged with so much information. What better time than now, smack in election season, when everyone is challenged to imagine the future they want for this country. Consider yourselves warned: we’re going to browbeat everybody to give free education for all.
Krissy Conti is former student regent of the University of the Philippines.
Original published on The Philippine Online Chronicles http://thepoc.net/component/k2/18058-why-ups-socialized-tuition-fails