repost: on the tuition increase.
in june last year, i wrote the post below displaying my intense opposition to the tuition increase. the reason is pretty obvious: up is a goddamn state university, therefore the burden of subsidizing it falls squarely on the shoulders of the state. there is no negotiation, no compromise. it's provided for in the 1987 constitution. and no one ever questions the constitution.then again, that's not exactly the case now.
not only has the up board of regents (made up, in bulk, by malacañang appointees) betrayed the up community by deliberately uninviting and misleading the student and faculty regent to the unorthodoxly-set bor meet (friday, noon, right before the cancelled lantern parade), it has also, in effect, railroaded the eventual and (almost) complete state abandonment of education.
sure, not all people get to go to college, especially if you can't sustain the lifestyle changes it demands. but everyone should never be denied access to state subsidized tertiary education. up serves as the last resort for most students who cannot afford commercialized colleges. it's mandated to be one, and its integrity as a STATE university should never be marred by a cheap attempt by the BOR to get a quick buck by jacking up tuition 300 percent.
i was figuratively leafing through my previous blog entries, and i found this one below, written june 30, 2006. i didn't edit it or even update the events that took place as i wrote it, precisely for the reason that the arguments i posited in the article - however vitriol-filled the language i used for it was - still are my arguments until now.
by the way, since the decision has not been technically "ratified," we iskolars ng bayan still can do something to turn this around. especially for us who know people who are still in high school, with dreams of going to up but can't realize it because of the astronomical costs these tuition hikes will bring, it's time for us not to betray them. there's a january 24 mobilization that will come to a head in quezon hall, and this is one occasion where we can show these Board pipsqueaks that they might hold the highest policy-making body in the university, but we UP students and faculty have the greater power to turn things around.
it has been done before. diliman commune, the collapse of sb 2587, the reintroduction of the nstp program. there is no reason why it should not work now.
xanananananananana
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oh. my. god. something that hasn't happened in more than 16 years is bound to happen again. the up board of regents is planning to jack up tuition rates by more than 200 percent.
if the bor gets its way, incoming up freshmen will have to pay P1,000 per unit in up diliman (where i go to school, byy the way). which, by the way, is waaaay far from the current P300. so if right now, the average tuition for a up student is P5,400 for an 18-unit load, the tenetative charge for the next year's up freshman would more or less go to P18,000 or more, if he/she wants to take in more units.
now this might look puny to the six-digit tuition other students may have at the ateneo, la salle or ua&p, and you might buy in the stupid argument that the government does not have enough money to provide for education. but let me stop playing devil's advocate here and tell you why this could just be the biggest sin the bor can commit against the up community, and by association, the country.
first of all, up is a state university. meaning, the government should provide for the university. like, allot a budget. and if the government in question is decent/effective enough, it should place education on top of its priorities. but with the fucked-up government we have right now (lorded by that shorty parrot over there who has no sense of discretion or conscience), the only excuse up students have been getting is that the government has no money.
yeah right.
how about putting more than 80 percent (this is a 2005 figure; not sure about the final statistics for this year) of the national budget to paying ONLY the country's interest in world bank-imf loans? and how about putting the remainder to it to the military? and how about the last morsels of it to corruption and "presidential funds," which mostly go to the cronies? and where the hell does education factor in this picture. ask the kids who had to hold umbrellas when they go to class.
however, under any and all circumstances, the government is under obligation, whether it likes it or not, to fund education as a human right. the government has no right to condone, worse to instigate, the commercialization of education. bwecause then it would only benefit those who have the money to do so.
second (addendum to the last point), education is a universal human right, that's why state universities such as up exist. and being a state u, it caters to all social classes. if you introduce higher tuition, how is it supposed to benefit the students who have to take out loans now that tuition is still at 300? what are they supposed to do? drop out? quit? file an indefinite leave? whore themselves? where's your mandate in that picture?
third, if the justification is that the fees will be "at par" with that of more exclusive schools, it's total bullshit. you cannot measure education by the size of your school bill, in the same vein that you cannot measure the intelligence of a child by the size of his/her parents' bank account. if the goal is to keep the university at par with the others that it's always comaring itself with, why waste your time with such artificial/cosmetic change? it's like repainting the facade of the up health service just to make it look like it can do brain surgery now. it's preposterous at best, insipid at worst.
and fifth, it sets a precedent. if they can raise tuition like that, then they can raise labfees like that. sooner or later, they can have an sb 2587-ish charter ratified in congress and relieve the government of its obligations. and then the university will no longer be any more respectable than the diploma mill colleges advertised and scattered all over the metro.
the last time such a drastic tuition increase took place was in 1989, when then up president edgardo angara (never forget the name) jacked up tuition from P40 to P300. more than 500 percent! atty. victor avecilla (my mass media law professor at cmc, and one of the people i greatly respect) filed a case against the bastards, but the supreme court ruled on angara's favor. the not-so-original rationale was that the fee increase was supposed to put up at par with ateneo and foreign universities, and because the budget was going down.
but if you want to get back the teachers who left, the facilities that have disintegrated with disuse, give the students better quality education, we go back to the core argument: IT'S THE GOVERNMENT'S RESPONSIBILITY TO PROVIDE FOR EDUCATION. BECAUSE EDUCATION IS A UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHT. say no to budget cut!
all of this, while i attended a book launch at the university of the philippines press, where the academic elite were there and the new logo (which i didn't really like. i like the alibata logo better) revealed. they acted as if up was your typical brady bunch university where all is bright, happy and gay. i wanted to strangle them one by one, but i had to keep my composure.
putang ina bakit nila ginagawa sa atin ito?
xanananananananana
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