Don’t veto free tuition bill, leftist solons urge Duterte

The left-wing Makabayan bloc in the House of Representatives pleaded to President Duterte to reject his economic managers’ advice to veto a bill passed by Congress providing for free college education and sign it into law instead.

In a statement, ACT Teachers Representatives France Castro and Antonio Tinio said Mr. Duterte should not “heed the wrong information of his advisers” about the government not having enough funds for free college education.

They said proponents had already shown that the government could afford the costs of implementing the bill.

P100-billion budget

Economic managers, led by Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno, had said the measure would require up to P100 billion in funds. But Castro said 2018 projections showed that only P13.2 billion had been spent on tuition and other fees in colleges and universities.

The Commission on Higher Education had estimated the cost to be at least P34 billion, higher than the 2018 projection cited by Castro but lower than Diokno’s figure.

“Free college will therefore not cost P100 billion, as Diokno alleges,” Castro said in the ACT Teachers statement.

Giving free higher education, the statement said, would “contribute to the shaping of our youth and to nation-building.”

Cheap labor force

Kabataan Rep. Sarah Jane Elago lambasted Diokno’s statement that free college education “benefits the individual and not society.”

“Diokno’s statement merely revealed the twisted state of neo-liberal education in the country today,” said Elago. “It’s designed for individual development, only to serve the pockets of a few, as well as the market’s needs for cheap and docile labor,” she added.

Rep. Ariel Casilao said Mr. Duterte’s economic managers opposed free college education because they wanted the youth to become part of the cheap labor force.

“They want to preserve a vast reserve industrial army so as to keep wages very low and for big business to profit from it,” Casilao said.