Educators, students decry 'massive' budget cuts, problems in free higher education

Professors, students, and employees of various public universities and colleges held a picket protest at the House of Representatives on Tuesday, Sept. 12, to denounce the massive cuts in tertiary education budgets and problems that “restrict, instead of facilitate the access to free higher education.”

“Amid the government’s tack to decrease government funding to tertiary education and restrict access to free higher education, our professors, students, and staff come united to defend the life of our public tertiary education institutions,” said the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Secretary General Raymond Basilio as he tackled issues that hound the implementation of free higher education.

The House of Representatives (HOR) Committee on Appropriations summoned back the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) in the 2024 budget hearings to answer issues on the disbursement of free tuition funds, among others.

Meanwhile, Alliance of Concerned Teachers SUCs Chairperson and University of the Philippines (UP) Faculty Regent Carl Marc Ramota lamented that the Marcos government wanted to slash next year’s budget for state universities and colleges (SUCs) by P7 billion and the CHED budget by P1 billion wherein a big part of which is for student scholarships and free higher education fund.

“This proposed P8 billion cuts in tertiary education budget spell grave repercussions to the operations of our already struggling public universities and the already limited enjoyment of the Filipino youth’s right to education,” Ramota said.

“While the government has P27 million of confidential and intelligence funds to spend each day next year, about 60 percent of our state colleges and universities have less than P20,000 budget per student for a semester,” Ramota said.

“Such grave underspending in education and gross misprioritization in the use of public funds is sure to pull down our country deeper into crisis and underdevelopment,” he added.

For Basilio, instead of facilitating the delivery of free higher education, CHED’s bureaucratic “incompetence and unjust policies hinder the flow of much-needed funds to support the free education of our students.”

“It owes our public universities billions of undisbursed free education funds, while it imposes unreasonable and anti-student conditions to free higher education that deprives our students of their right to education,” he added.

Related to this, the groups called on Congress to “increase not slash” the budget for SUCs.

“Expand, not scale down, the free higher education program,” Basilio said. “We demand CHED to junk all policies that hinder the youth’s enjoyment of their right to free education,” he added.