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MANILA, Philippines–Private colleges and universities stand to lose up to P150 billion due to decreased enrollment over five years once senior high school is fully implemented in 2016, according to the country’s biggest organization of private schools.
The Coordinating Council of Private Educational Associations (Cocopea) said that with the start of the added two-year senior high school, colleges would have no freshmen enrollees in school years 2016-2017 and 2017-2018.
The decreased enrollment is expected to carry over in the next three years or until school year 2020-2021, according to Cocopea.
Certain, inevitable
“While the amount of losses that will be absorbed by the private colleges and universities varies, the financial impact is certain and inevitable. According to a study, the entire private education sector stands to absorb P150 billion worth of losses for a period of five years,” Cocopea legal counsel Joseph Noel Estrada said.
Some 30,000 college faculty and personnel face the prospect of layoff by 2016, although some colleges have already begun to retrench faculty.
Stabilization fund
At the House hearing on Tuesday, the Commission on Higher Education discussed the creation of a P29-billion fund to help tide over affected schools for five years.
Under the proposal, P10 billion is earmarked for higher education institutions, P17 billion for displaced teachers and P2 billion for affected nonteaching personnel.
The Cocopea was surprised to hear about the proposed five-year P29-billion “stabilization fund” for over a thousand private higher education institutions and tens of thousands of college faculty and staff who will be affected by the K-12 basic education program.
“We’ve heard only about the proposed stabilization fund during the hearing,” Estrada said.
Sustenance
He said the fund would “greatly help” colleges sustain their operations and keep their faculty, although they have not been advised about the mechanics.
“Generally, we hope to use it to cover the cost of keeping our faculty and the costs of retrenchment if unavoidable,” Estrada said.
“The government should be able to strike a balance between the interests of the faculty who stand to be affected by the lack of enrollment starting 2016 on the one hand, and the sustainability of private colleges and universities on the other,” he added.