Corporate Social Responsibility: Concerns of the Society – Education

It is a cruel paradox that a college education helps to escape poverty, but Filipinos
have to be rich to afford one. Furthermore, those who do manage to go to college
run the risk that the education they pay for may turn out to be sub-standard or
defective.

Critics say the root of the problem is that Philippines’ system of higher education follows the
American model. Most universities and colleges are private and profit-driven. JC Tejano, the
national spokesperson of the Student Council Alliance of the Philippines (SCAP), says: “All
schools want to do is to earn money.” In the SCAP’s view, they do far too little to ensure quality.

According to government data, there are 2,247 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the
Philippines, and 88 % of them are private colleges and universities. Of the country’s 2.9 million
higher education students, 1.74 million (60 %) are enrolled in private schools. Though they are
smaller in number, public HEIs tend to be crowded, underfunded and overstretched.

Cost issues

The government’s Council on Higher Education (CHED) currently estimates that, on the
average, a student in a private school will pay 237,600 pesos (€ 4,200) for a four year course. On
average, however, public schools are not much cheaper. The CHED reckons that tuition for a
complete four-year course will cost 233,600 pesos.

At a top tier university, however, the costs will amount to 400,000 pesos. The best and most
expensive schools are in the private sector – but that is equally true for the worst and cheapest
ones.

Compared with what a typical Filipino household earns, the costs of higher education are stiff.
According to the official Philippines’ 2009 Family Income and Expenditure Survey, the average
family’s annual income is a mere 206,000 pesos. The survey notes that for the families in the
bottom 30 % the average is only 62,000 pesos.

HEIs tend to increase tuition every year. In the Philippines, college subjects are taught in small
“units”. In 2005, according to the online magazine Bulatlat, the average cost per unit was more
than 330 pesos. By 2011, the average tuition per unit had risen to more than 500 pesos.

Tuition isn’t the only financial worry of college students of course. The CHED figures do not
include board, lodging, transportation and other expenses. These are not trifling outlays. For
example, professors tell stories of students skipping classes because they cannot pay for
transportation to go to school; there have also been reports of students who can’t focus because
they’re weak from not having eaten properly.

Aggravating matters, HEIs are creative in devising ways of padding their bills. Among other
things, they levy fees for “laboratories”, “energy” and “development”. Last year, Antonio Pascua
Jr., an official of the youth group Anakbayan, claimed one school was charging a “restricted fee”,
the purpose of which was not clear to students. He says this is “completely baffling”.
Patricia Licuanan, the CHED chairperson, wants “all HEIs to carefully study their tuition and fee
increases each year”. On behalf of the government, she insists that every HEI should “spend
wisely and judiciously in order to lessen the costs to its most important stakeholders – its
students”.

The sad truth, however, is that many students discover at some point or another that they are no
longer able to afford tuition and drop out of the HEI they have been attending. They either stop
studying altogether or transfer to a cheaper HEI. The new schools are worse, of course, but they
are also in the habit of increasing fees.

In 2005, the Bulatlat report stated the dropout rate was as high as 73 %. Today, student leader
Tejano demands a freeze on tuition and other fees. His organisation wants the burden on
ordinary people to decrease. It also wants to ensure that more youngsters get a good education.

Private HEIs respond by saying they have to raise tuition fees or go bankrupt. CHED’s Licuana
agrees and says that “quality education has a price”. She points out costs for faculty salaries,
laboratories, equipment et cetera. Therefore, she argues, tuition hikes are “necessary”. At the
same time she wants them to be “justified, reasonable and transparent”.

Quality concerns

Apart from the cost of education there is also the matter of quality. Among the private HEIs,
there are a handful of top tier universities. Their graduates can probably compete with those of
other elite schools around the world. Most other private-sector HEIs, however, basically seem to
seek profits at the expense of substance.

A university faculty member, who asks not to be identified, says: “Some of them shouldn’t even
be schools at all – there’s a proliferation of HEIs which are not qualified.” This educator speaks
of fly-by-night operations” and “diploma mills”. While some do not charge high tuition, their
quality is below standard.

Other teachers, who decline to be identified, tell disturbing stories too. One school, for instance,
does not stock books in its library because its president argues that books are obsolete and
everything can be downloaded from the Internet. A few semesters ago, another HEI was still
using a textbook on international studies dated 1976. The world has changed since. 1976 was
one year after the Vietnam War, 13 years before the fall of the Berlin wall and 25 years before
September 11.

Another professor tells of a school that refuses to give faculty members money for photocopying
exam papers. They either have to pay for copying themselves or write everything out on a
blackboard.

The government of President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III is not blind to the problem of low
standards in higher education. In fact, it has ambitious reform plans for the education sector.
They include adding extra years to primary and secondary schooling (see box).

There is indeed room for improvement, as CHED Chairperson Licuanan says: “The Aquino
administration inherited a chaotic higher education system.” In her view it is marked by too
many higher-education institutions and programmes, a job-skills mismatch, oversubscribed and
undersubscribed programmes, deteriorating quality and limited access to quality higher
education.

For these reasons, the CHED is pursuing a Higher Education Reform Agenda. Among other
things, it aims to improve standards and expand access.

At the same time, the commission’s political clout is being tested at the ground level. For some
time, it has been trying to close down a Manila school called the International Academy of
Management and Economics. This school uses the acronym IAME, which sounds a bit like the
vastly more prestigious Asian Institute of Management (AIM). The CHED accuses the IAME of
“gross and serious violations, continued defiance and failure to comply with existing laws, rules
and regulations”. Nonetheless, IAME is still in business. It claims to have close ties to President
Aquino himself.

Shady schools, however, are not the only challenge. Because secondary education tends to be
poor in the Philippines, HEIs take off from a rather low level. The writer and scholar Isagani
Cruz, who is a visiting fellow at Oxford University and has taught at various top-tier HEIs in the
Philippines, asserts that first year college in the Philippines is really only equivalent to high
school in other countries in academic terms.

All these issues prevent education from effectively contributing to economic growth and national
development. The issue is well understood. Bill Luz of the National Competitiveness Council
states: “Many in the business community have complained about our state of education. Indeed
in global competitive indices, we have been rated poorly in terms of quality of basic education,
quality of science and math education.” He points out that cooperation between industry and
academia must improve.

Indeed, many graduates lack the kind of skills and knowledge that employers expect of
professionals. “A large number of college graduates are taking low productivity jobs,” was the
assessment of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in a country study of the Philippines in 2007.
In the same document, the ADB bemoaned a “scarcity of skilled workers in industries such as
information technology and business process outsourcing”.

Earlier this year, the World Bank made basically the same point about the Philippines in a
report on higher education in Asia. It argued that there was a disconnect between the education
system, government programmes and private sector needs. Unsurprisingly, the report
recommended improving the quality of higher education in order to boost the professional
competence of graduates.
Solution:

Subsidizing public higher education

THE NATIONAL government long ago sought to bring higher education within reach of the
people who need it most through state universities and colleges (SUCs), where the subsidized
tuition enables a school like the Polytechnic University of the Philippines to charge a mere P12
per unit for its undergraduate programs. This has been so since 1972, when PUP first opened its
halls to the public. Likewise, the University of the Philippines, the country’s most prestigious
public school, charges P1,000 per unit, with scholarships, grants in aid, and limited student loan
programs in place. (For the record, UP used to charge much less.)

At the budget plenary hearing for the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) and the SUCs
last November, the notion of bringing quality education within reach of the poor must have
resonated strongly among the senators that they moved for more money for the SUCs to cover
undergraduate tuition for all students, regardless of social status.

The national government is correct in saying that education is a public good. The CHEd’s reform
agenda states that the twin strategic roles of higher education, as stated in the Philippine
Development Plan 2011-2016, are “as an instrument of poverty alleviation and as a vehicle for
technologically driven national development and global competitiveness.”

Higher education has historically been delivered by private enterprise on its own and with little
or no government incentives; by and large it has done a great job. Forward-thinking business
leaders have been heavily investing in private higher education institutions for several years
now, and the qualitative improvements and their efforts in advancing postsecondary and
tertiary education are becoming increasingly evident. Just consider Far
Eastern University, University of the East, National University, Phinma and Malayan University,
to name a few. The only drawback is affordability.

The average tuition is about P5,000 per unit. High-ranking schools will charge much more, of
course, but the graduates and their families invariably say that the investment was well worth it.

The CHEd maintains: “In fact, the poor must be fully subsidized while those with the economic
means to pay for their entire education many times over must share the cost of their education
through the payment of tuition, differentiated by social class. In this way, the funds that would
have gone to paying for the full tuition of these students could be spent instead in building the
physical and human infrastructure for the quality higher education we all aspire for—and to date
is still beyond our reach, given the uneven quality of higher education institutions in general and
SUCs in particular.”

Insights:
Although college has never been thought of as a cheap investment, the cost of tuition constantly
seems to be on the rise.

Unfortunately, in today’s society, not receiving a degree can hinder one’s career trajectory.
Hence why so many young adults take the hit and opt to go into thousands of pesos worth of
debt in order to receive a higher education.
While those costly fees may result in a cozier and more prestigious place to live for four years,
the skyrocketing price isn’t always a good thing.

Here are some negative effects of high tuition costs that we foresee:

TWO-YEAR COLLEGE ENROLLMENT INCREASES

For some students, a high tuition cost doesn’t mean they’ve given up on a degree, it just means
they might do it in an alternative way. Many students are unsure as to what field they’d like to go
into in the first place, which can make paying big amount of money sound irresponsible.

So instead of spending four years at a larger institution, many students opt to go a cheaper, and
at times, more flexible route by enrolling in a two-year college.

Moreover, since every traditional school requires you to take prerequisite courses before you
focus on your major alone, many students decide to save money and take those basic courses at
a two-year institution before moving on to a larger school.

Unfortunately, while it might save them money in the short-term, it can cost them in the long-
term. Many students don’t check to see if their credits will transfer to a four-year college before
completing their courses. By the time they find out they don’t transfer, it’s often too late, which
means they might have to re-take the courses at the college they transfer to.

GRADUATION RATES ARE FALLING

While many students head off to college, they may quickly find themselves overwhelmed by the
cost. This is especially true of part-time students who are trying to work to pay for their
schooling. They may begin to feel that they need to work more to accommodate the high cost,
only to find themselves drowning in their schoolwork.
However, full-time students aren’t necessarily better off. For the majority of college students,
completing their degree in four years isn’t possible, as it seems that each degree possesses a
mountain of requirements to complete it.

Of course, the longer one attends college, the more they’ll have to pay off, which can cause many
students to drop-out after a certain point.

LOW-INCOME FAMILIES SEE COLLEGE AS IMPOSSIBLE

Although this isn’t true for everyone, for many low-income students, college has become the
unattainable. Even though universities and various other institutions offer financial assistance
and aid programs that can help cover the cost of college, it often isn’t enough.
Many families don’t like the idea of having loans hanging over their heads, either. Ultimately,
this causes low-income students to view college as impossible, forcing them to go into career
fields that don’t require a degree.

In the eyes of many hiring managers across the country, a college degree is a requirement, and
it’s an accomplishment many students would like to say they made.

However, as institutions keep raising their prices, many graduates might find themselves
discouraged at their prospective start to life. The cost of higher education isn’t without its
consequences on our culture.

Mateo, Joan

Eustaquio, Junaleah

Concepcion, Rizabel

Llantada, Kathryn