Belgica and Villanueva on Education

In response to my question, “What is the first bill on education that you will sponsor if you are elected to the Senate?,” GRECO BELGICA answered, “The Tuition Fee Voucher Bill. The bill will transfer the PDAF or pork barrel to a voucher fund where all students and the young can get a voucher and bring it to any school they want to study in. This will create opportunity for all students to receive quality education. This will create competition among campuses and, therefore, bring down tuition fees as well, while offering the best education.”

There are existing programs that allow students to pay tuition in private schools through government vouchers or other scholarship methods. As Belgica correctly observes, these programs are inadequate, primarily because they lack funding. To replace the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) with a Tuition Fee Voucher Fund, however, is a campaign promise that is impossible to fulfil.

Even if a few Representatives and Senators do not make use of their pork barrel, most legislators will not agree to such a law. Legislators need to be able to fund projects in their areas. It is against self-interest, as well as the interest of their constituencies, for them to vote for the elimination of the PDAF.

What is more doable, although still very difficult to push through in Congress, is to stop the proliferation of state and local universities and colleges. The money for SUCs and LUCs could be spent funding the tuition of students in private Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Basic education is indeed a right of every Filipino, but higher education is not a right, but a privilege. Only those that have academic aptitude should go to HEIs.

Our HEIs are full of students who want a diploma only to be able to get a job. One of the major objectives of the K to 12 program is to ensure that high school graduates are qualified for employment or entrepreneurship. Students may now get a National Certificate (NC) 2 and even NC 3 before they finish high school. There is no need for high school graduates to go to college, unless they want to be professionals. High school graduates can always get jobs.

In other words, there is no need for the government to supply higher education cheaper than that available in private schools. Let the private schools worry about higher education. The government should focus on basic education.

EDDIE VILLANUEVA has a similar first bill on education: “Revitalization of the government scholarship program. We shall aim to provide free education for students living below the poverty line, from elementary to college. This package shall include a combination of direct subsidies, allowances, and scholarships. The government will provide partial subsidies, while the other part will come from the private sector as part of their social responsibility.”

Since basic education is free, his proposed bill really focuses on higher education. It aims to bring down the cost of higher education. The government already provides partial subsidies to high school students through the Education Service Contracting (ESC) program of the Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education (GASTPE). Because the K to 12 law, when signed, specifies that DepEd must work with HEIs, it will be legal and necessary to expand ESC to private HEIs.

Taxpayers that send their children to private HEIs pay two tuition fees: the tuition fees of their children and the tuition fees of strangers that go to SUCs and LUCs. While it may be argued that nobody is forcing parents to send their children to private schools, it is also true that, in general, private HEIs offer much better quality education than SUCs or LUCs.

There is objective proof for this. Of the four Philippine universities that are consistently ranked internationally, only one is public (UP). The other three (ADMU, DLSU, UST) are private. Since not everybody can go to UP (because UP cannot accept all the bright students in the country even if it wants to), students are forced to go to private HEIs if they want world-class education.

Because private HEIs depend on tuition for their operations, they usually do not offer courses that do not make money. In theory, SUCs and LUCs exist in order to offer courses that private HEIs do not want to offer.

In practice, however, most SUCs and LUCs now offer exactly the same courses that private HEIs offer. That goes against the whole point of public-private partnership in education. Private HEIs should offer what plenty of students want (in order to generate enough income to sustain operations). SUCs and LUCs should offer what students want or need but cannot get from private HEIs.

As a random example, take physics. The Nobel Prize last year was awarded to Serge Haroche and David Wineland for experiments in individual quantum systems. The world will soon change because of new technologies based on these experiments.

No private HEI in the Philippines can attract enough students to justify buying the expensive equipment needed for similar experiments. Instead of offering Nursing and Hotel and Restaurant Management, SUCs and LUCs should offer programs in quantum physics and other unpopular fields that the country sorely needs.