COMMISSION on Higher Education Chairperson Prospero De Vera III yesterday warned that doing away with free higher education in the country would result in “hopeless” youths joining the armed struggle.
De Vera said providing free quality tertiary education is one of the responsibilities of the government and doing away with it, as some quarters have proposed, including Finance chief Benjamin Diokno, is not a wise move.
“Education is a responsibility of the government to give opportunity to its youth. Give them hope that there is a better way. The worst thing that we can do is to make our young people hopeless. Once they become hopeless, they might be tempted to join the armed struggle,” De Vera told the Bagong Pilipinas Ngayon public briefing.
“That’s very, very dangerous for young people. One way of making people believe in government is to give them hope,” he added.
Last month, De Vera defended the free tuition policy in State Universities and Colleges (SUCs), saying it is part of the government’s responsibility to ensure that children of poor families are able to get the tertiary education they need.
“We have a responsibility as a country to take steps to make sure that we bring them to the mainstream. We bring them to get educated. We give them hope so that they will not fight the government so that insurgency will be reduced,” he added.
However, he said he had no quarrel with amending Republic Act 10931, also known as the Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education Act signed by then President Rodrigo Duterte in 2017 to provide underprivileged students the chance to pursue tertiary education through free tuition and exemption of other fees in state universities and colleges.
“I welcome the opportunity to review the Free Higher Education Act since it has been six years since its implementation and there is enough data on the ground to make policy decisions,” he said.
De Vera, however, said he does not agree with the argument that RA 10931 is a waste of government resources.
“We can correct it without setting aside the law. Let us correct what can be improved, let us correct the criteria and improve on it,” he said, adding that as early as last year, he had told lawmakers that the CHED is open to amending or improving the law.
At the same time, De Vera said it is not correct to say the SUCs should be stringent in accepting students as all of them hold entrance examinations.
“All of our SUCs have entrance tests but the problem lies with their limited capacity to accept students,” he said.
He cited the fact that more than 100,000 graduating high school students take the University of the Philippines entrance test but only around 4,000 are accepted annually.
He said the same thing is also happening at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, wherein only 15 to 20 percent of those who took the entrance test are actually accepted due to limited absorption capacity.
Nationwide, De Vera said SUCs accept only around 50 percent of those who took the entrance exams.
“Our problem is the admission rate in our SUCs since their capacity to accept freshmen students is also limited,” he explained.
Since the implementation of RA 10931, De Vera said the participation rate (the number of college-age Filipinos who are going to tertiary education) had increased from 32 percent to the present 41 percent.
Data from the CHED showed there are 1.97 million students enrolled in 197 higher education institutions (114 SUCs and local universities and colleges) who are beneficiaries of the free tuition program under the Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education and 364,168 more who receive subsidies through the government’s Tulong Dunong program and the Tertiary Education Subsidy in the academic year 2021-2022.
De Vera had earlier said college entrance tests should focus more on equity so that students coming from poor families would have higher chances of getting free education in SUCs.
De Vera issued the statement in reaction to Diokno’s proposal for a nationwide screening of students wanting to qualify for free education in SUCs. Diokno said the current implementation was inefficient and wasteful.
Under the Finance chief’s proposal, the score of the examinee will determine in which SUC he or she will be allowed to enroll.
Diokno earlier expressed similar concerns about the long-term sustainability of the current free tuition for higher education during a House hearing on the CHED’s proposed 2024 budget.
However, De Vera said Diokno’s proposal, if implemented, would be “disastrous” as it would be similar to the UPCAT, which he said is favorable to students who have the resources to attend review classes before taking the exams, unlike those coming from poor families who do not have such luxury.
