MANILA, Philippines—I was crestfallen to read that a University of the Philippines (UP) college freshman, who qualified as a Chemistry major, dropped out after three days of school in the Diliman campus. His math professor, Noli N. Reyes, wrote a letter to the editor last week. The boy was accompanied by his father when he came to have his dropping out forms signed. “The young man is a member of a minority group in Mindanao. [H]e qualified as a freshman in the College of Science … a distinction he earned through intelligence, pure hard work and perseverance amid poverty. But in a few days, father and son are going back to Mindanao for good.”UP increased its tuition fees threefold last school year, coupled with reforms in the Socialized Tuition Financial Assistance Program (STFAP) to make rich students pay full tuition (some P20,000 each semester) while waiving tuition for poor students and giving them a P12,000 stipend per semester. In the reformed STFAP, students were divided into five brackets. Only the wealthiest—whose families earned more than P1 million a year—pay the full tuition and fees, while the poorest—earning P80,000 or less—pay nothing and get a stipend on top of that. Apparently, the student from Mindanao was classified in the middle range of incomes between P135,000 and P500,000. His mother is a government employee, and his father is unemployed. The good news is that he was therefore correctly “bracketed.” The bad news is that he would get only a 40 percent discount on tuition fees, but nothing more. He would pay in full the laboratory and other fees, and enjoy no stipend whatsoever. Assuming that he spends P50 per meal and gets dorm space at P2,000 per month, his parents would have to allocate half the family budget each month for their high achieving son. This early into the academic year, the family faced the music and decided to bail out. Their story is not in any way isolated. The other day, I learned of a college undergraduate who went on leave to work as a bagger in one of the big supermarkets. I once had a law student who would skip meals the whole day in school, something that he would tell me only some years later while he was already studying at Harvard on a fellowship. I am worried that these stories will be lived out over and over again, as parents and their children agonize over hard choices. Some will have happy endings, others not. The tuition fee increase and STFAP redesign were marketed as a perfectly sane and reasonable measure. After all, UP tuition had remained frozen for a good 17 years, and even the socialized tuition brackets hadn’t kept abreast of inflation. The increase appealed to UP’s middle-class sensibility—a curiosity in itself, for an institution that takes pride in its activist traditions—but it was rational only in that limited context. But it couldn’t be rational for that student in Mindanao, one who weathered the vagaries of life in the Third World, competed with 70,000 other takers of the UP College Admission Test—including those from the elite schools in Manila—and ended up in the top 3,000 or so who made it to the flagship campus in Diliman, and I should add, had the courage to major in chemistry. It is not rational in terms of maximizing talent when the best and the brightest have to go on leave to work as baggers at supermarkets. It is not rational in relation to the astronomical sums involved when a Commission on Elections chair can tell the socioeconomic planning secretary, “Sec, may 200 ka dito” [“Secretary, there’s 200 for you here”] and the President and chief law enforcer merely look the other way. Just imagine how many students could have studied on that P200-million bonanza—and even that was loose change for the thieving maniacs who rule our country. I agree with those who worry that UP is trying to solve all the problems of the world—admirable and heroic, yes, but UP can spread itself too thin. But surely there are manageable problems that fate brings to our doorstep for us to solve, and a poor bright student who surmounted formidable odds to make it to Diliman is a living, walking dare for us to make things right. And indeed many have stepped forward to offer scholarships to the young man, including a US-based alumna who wrote her own letter to the editor yesterday. I can confirm this pattern of alumni generosity: when I was law dean, I found that donors were only too happy to give scholarships. (Sen. Franklin Drilon gave 12 scholarships in one fell swoop.) The real challenge is how to institutionalize this support and ensure that the genuinely poor are not turned away. I can perfectly understand the bureaucratic fuss. The Supreme Court no less has affirmed disciplinary sanctions against a law student who was found out to have falsified his STFAP claims. (Significantly, that boy is now a lawyer, which means that the Court later found him to be of “good moral character,” and for all we know, he must have scored magnificently in Legal Ethics in the bar exams!) However, those who administer the socialized tuition and scholarship programs need to develop methods that are at once more sophisticated (to catch the likes of that law student) and more compassionate (to minister to the likes of our chemistry major from Mindanao). For instance, given the family income of our chemistry major, after his parents cover his studies in Manila, the amount that would be left for the family would have placed them well within the poorest income bracket. My UP Beloved is a UP that cares. For many of the poor but worthy students out there, what it offers is not just quality education. It offers hope that that which is beyond their reach financially becomes attainable academically. What is it to serve the nation through grand scholarship but risk losing our souls by shutting out the most worthy among our youth? * * * Comments to passionforreason@gmail.com |
