Swamped

I have a friend who bribed his kids with the promise of a car if they passed the UPCAT. That makes eminent economic sense.

While tuition and fees in private tertiary education institutions climbed well into six digits, state colleges and universities are now tuition free. My friend estimates he will break even in four semesters if his kids make it into UP.

Earlier this week, the admissions office at UP Diliman was swamped with thousands of high school seniors filing applications to take the college admissions tests. Some of them camped overnight in the campus to ensure their places in the line. Many applicants fainted in the queue and had to be evacuated by ambulances.

This never happened before. True, the UP has been mocked as “University of Pila” because one had to queue everywhere to get anything, but the admissions office was never swamped this way. And this was just for the deadline for students graduating from private high schools. More applicants may be expected when the deadline for public high schools comes in a few days.

Expectedly, the admissions systems crumbled underneath the crush of applicants. While an on-line option was available for applicants, the students who descended on the Diliman campus early this week did not want to take chances. They wanted a hard copy of confirmation of their applications in hand.

The struggle for a place in the country’s premier university is going to be intense. Last year, 80,000 applicants applied for a place. Only 17 percent of applicants were admitted.

This year, university authorities estimate the number of applicants will be over twice that. This means only about 8 percent will be admitted.

The admissions test is a tough one. It is as much a test of mental endurance as it is of stock knowledge.

This year, there was some controversy over the delay in the release of the UPCAT results. With over twice the number of applicants this year, we can only wish those charged with marking the test papers bon courage.

I hope a lot of digital technologies have been incorporated in the UPCAT. It does not seem possible to process all the exam papers in good time.

Cream of the crop

The lower percentage of applicants admitted to the UP System is good news for the institution. It means the institution will not only have first pick of the best students, it will also mean we will have the cream of the crop – in fact, the creamiest of the cream.

Unfortunately, the number of places in the University is limited. The UP is not a sausage factory. Its resources have been stretched over the years. The teaching staff complains of having classes far larger than optimal.

With the additional attraction of free education, the University will attract those most capable of paying their way through college. That is bad news for the private universities.

Admission to the UP is based entirely on merit. This is not an affirmative action institution – and should not be. Its institutional creed is excellence; not social amelioration.

Over the decades since I entered this University as a freshman, the student profile changed dramatically.

Coming from a private, Catholic high school, I recall being thoroughly intimidated (and outnumbered) by the brightest products of our public secondary school system. They always seemed smarter and more adept in a faculty-centered institution. A UP degree, after all, meant social mobility.

Over the decades, since the quality of public secondary education declined comparatively, the majority of UP students came from private schools. Today, our students are not only smarter, they are also healthier and wealthier. Parking is a problem and security guards are hired to keep student cars from invading faculty parking spaces.

Once, the UP tried a “democratization” program to bring in more students from the poorer regions and weaker high schools preparation. The “democratization” students were housed for free, provided a stipend and given the best professors to teach them. 

But they could not surmount the infirmity afflicted by inferior primary and secondary school preparation. This experiment caused more harm than good. Many “democratization” students suffered emotional and psychological breakdown. The experiment was abandoned.

For better or for worse, the UP is now an institution for the reproduction of the country’s elites. Superior intellectual and social preparation from expensive private schools enable them to ace the admissions test, be awarded with a place in the State University and equip them with the credentials to compete even better in the professions.

Skewed

In the populist rush to give away free tertiary education, no one asked the crucial questions: What will this mean for the private universities that serve the majority of students?

UP education, considering all the built-in institutional inefficiencies, is costlier than the more expensive private universities. The private schools can only compete by charging more to maintain faculty quality. Now the private institutions are in real danger of losing their more economically capable clientele to the public universities.

There is a real danger a quality gap between public tertiary education and private institutions will develop. Some private institutions, unless they drastically commercialize their offerings, will probably have to close down in the brutal competition for paying clients.

In the next few years we will see unjust migratory patterns. Richer students who can afford quality primary and secondary education will crowd out poorer students for places in the public universities. Poorer students, who went to inferior public high schools, will be forced to settle for more expensive private universities – or simply drop out.