The Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) said it could not stop the closure this month of the privately owned Quezon City campus of the Philippine School of Business Administration (PSBA).
The CHEd office in the National Capital Region will instead facilitate the transfer of some 4,000 affected students to another PSBA campus or other schools, and make sure students who are up for graduation in March next year will still get their degree from PSBA-QC.
“It’s really their call, that’s the thing with private schools. We just want to make sure that the students will have to be transferred,” CHEd Chair Patricia Licuanan said when asked if the commission would step in to stop the school’s closure on Oct. 18.
“Our main principle is that the students should not suffer. They (school administrators) have offered that, for the most part, they want the students to transfer to their Manila campus. That would be done automatically for all those who want that,” she added.
“But some might not be able to do it. That’s where the CHEd-NCR is trying to help them, to find other (schools) that they can go to,” Licuanan added.
PSBA-QC issued a notice of closure through newspapers last month, saying the school would be shutting down “due to serious business losses that have been sustained for the past eight years, including the recently concluded fiscal year ending on 31 May 2013.”
The notice also said the school would be shut down due “to the fact that the school is being operated by Attorney Benjamin P. Paulino without an independent permit from the CHEd and without authority from PSBA Inc.–QC, who is the grantee of recognition by CHEd.”
Licuanan said she had discussed options with CHEd-NCR Director Catherine Castañeda, who was “trying to see who will take the students.”
“It seems that the economic situation was very bad so they had to close. I suspect that there were also internal problems or politics going on between the present administrator or president of the board,” Licuanan said.
She acknowledged that not all students could afford the tuition and other costs entailed by transferring to another PSBA campus or another school.
“I suppose those who will graduate in October are lucky because they were able to get out before the crisis. But we are worried for the (graduating) students this second semester because they should really graduate from PSBA,” she said.
Licuanan explained that even if the graduating students would transfer to PSBA-Manila, they should still get their degree from PSBA-Quezon City. “(The QC campus) will not be open in the physical sense that the faculty will still be teaching. But maybe to enable (the graduating students) to get the degree, that’s being worked out.”