CHEd backs calls to increase education budget

MANILA, Philippines—As thousands of students marched against cuts in the subsidy for state schools, the Commission on Higher Education expressed support Friday for calls to raise the budget for public tertiary education, saying the proposed 2012 allocation was barely a “survival budget.”

CHEd Executive Director Julito Vitriolo said state universities and colleges (SUCs) would be unable to afford “ambitious projects” to raise their quality as the proposed P26.1 billion budget for some 110 schools was enough only for their “subsistence.”

“Because there is no dramatic increase in the subsidy, there is a standstill in quality.… It is only enough for their subsistence,” Vitriolo told the Inquirer.

“The budget is just to maintain a certain level.  It’s not even a development budget.  It’s a survival budget.  It’s not the kind of budget that could dramatically improve [the quality of education in SUCs],” he added.

The Department of Budget and Management had said the proposed budget for SUCs was already higher by 10.1 percent from the current year’s P23.7 billion.  The P26.1-billion proposal is still being deliberated in Congress.

Kabataan party-list Rep. Raymond Palatino, however, said the proposal is at P21.8 billion, barely half of what SUCs actually require for effective operations in 2012.

The National Union of Students of the Philippines  said roughly 50 SUCs would suffer cuts of up to P569.8 million under the 2012 budget, according to their estimates.

For instance, Malacañang’s proposed P5.54-billion budget for UP in 2012, already higher than this year’s P1.39 billion, is still far from the estimated P18 billion the UP system would need to properly run its campuses across the country, according to the NUSP.

The proposed P737-million budget for the Polytechnic University of the Philippines is meanwhile less than half the P2 billion it would need to educate some 65,000 students across the country.

Estimating that SUCs should receive a total P45.8 billion next year, Palatino this week filed a petition with the House of Representatives’ committee on appropriations seeking a P24-billion raise in the tertiary education budget.

The cuts in state subsidies come in the wake of higher enrollment in public tertiary schools, a trend CHEd has observed in recent years as students move to state schools in light of the rising cost of tuition in private institutions.

“I think we support the call of members of Congress, the House of Respresentatives, lobbying for increase in the budget.  But to get it, we’ll have to go through the bicameral committee,” Vitriolo said.

“The [budget] pie is limited to a certain size and more and more schools are sharing it… enrollment is increasing but the size of the pie remains the same, so the budget is diluted,” Vitriolo said.

London-based research and ratings firm Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) recently released its world university rankings, where no Philippine school made it to the top 300.

Only four schools —UP, Ateneo de Manila, De La Salle University and the University of Santo Tomas — placed within the top 600 list. Other than UP, no other state school made the list as QS noted the declining state spending on education.

“What’s a bit alarming is that, for instance, in the case of UP (University of the Philippines), they want to pursue projects to be able to compete in the world rankings [of top universities], but they cannot pursue ambitious projects with limited funds,” Vitriolo said.

Vitriolo explained that the budget for SUCs was calculated based on the principle of “normative financing,” where spending priority was given to performing schools while slashes in the operating budget were made for under-performing schools.

“It’s performance-based.  So it depends on your research output, enrollment, passing rate in licensure exams,” said Vitriolo.

He said plans were underway to rationalize the system of tertiary education, among them the “clustering and amalgamation” of state schools in certain regions with a number of institutions offering the same courses.

He said schools in Northern Luzon, the Cordillera Administrative Region and Northern Mindanao were already “warm to the idea” of amalgamation, which aims to more efficiently distribute and maximize limited state subsidies.