Part of the solution
SPECULATING ON the reasons for a suicide and attributing it to a single cause is a common and misleading habit of the media. The media also tend to make it seem as if killing one’s self vindicates the suicide, which is not only wrong, but also dangerous.
In one case, that of Davao City’s Mariannet Amper, the media very quickly attributed her suicide to poverty, in the process reducing the often complex reasons that drive people to suicide to a simplistic one. Only later did some of the media suggest that Amper’s suicide could have been due to a combination of reasons.
In that of the suicide of former Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief of Staff and then Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes, many of the media organizations said outright that the suicide, which occurred in the middle of Senate hearings on military corruption, had “vindicated” Reyes.
Both media habits were again evident in some of the reporting and commentary on the suicide of the 16-year old University of the Philippines (UP) Manila freshman student. Apparently the broadsheets, tabloids, and TV and radio networks sourced their reports on the incident from the student newspapers Manila Collegian and Philippine Collegian, both of which attributed the suicide of the student to her failure to enroll because of financial difficulties. At the same time, some of the reporting has come dangerously close to suggesting that taking one’s own life is an admirable way of demonstrating the validity of one’s grievances.
No doubt UP’s high tuition fees and its so-called Socialized Tuition Fee and Financial Assistance Program (STFAP) constitute part of the problem that both potential and actual students of UP have to contend with, and could have been among the causes of the student’s suicide. But whether it was the only one is a question only more information can establish.
However, the reality is that, at least as far as its tuition fees are concerned, UP has practically become a copy of so-called “exclusive” schools.
The continuing cuts in its budget by the government of the Philippines have been blamed for the increasingly dominant tendency among its administrators, particularly during the terms of the last two UP Presidents, to run UP like a corporation by raising its tuition fees and making the capacity to pay, for all practical purposes, a leading, if not the leading, qualification to remain in UP.
In 2010, for example, the budget approved by the House of Representatives severely reduced state support for several State universities and colleges (SUCs). The budget for maintenance and operations of the UP System, which has seven (7) constituent universities including an Open (Cyber) University, was cut by 50 percent—the biggest among the SUCs—from P1.2 billion in 2009 to some P600 million.
The UP budget was not the only casualty of the budget cuts which that year the Aquino administration justified as part of its policy to make state universities self-supporting. The budget of the biggest state university in the country, the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, was cut in the same year by P24 million, and that of the Philippine Normal University, which trains most of the country’s teachers, by P92 million.
Although some of the cuts have since been restored, UP’s response has been to raise tuition fees, which currently run from P1,500 per unit for UP Diliman, UP Manila, and UP Los Baños, and P1,000 per unit in other universities of the UP system such as UP Baguio and UP Visayas. STFAP, however, is supposed to assure those who cannot afford these admittedly high fees—equivalent in most instances to the fees charged by private universities—by reducing the fees and even charging no fees for such students. UP has also pointed out that it provides student loans and other forms of assistance in the form of scholarships.
Still and all, however, there is no lack of criticism of STFAP, primarily for its bracketing system, which students have described as unrealistic. For example, the family income requirement for a student to qualify for STFAP Bracket D, to which the student was assigned, is P135,001 to P250,000, which from any standpoint is too small for a family of seven to afford to pay 30 percent of the base tuition fee, plus full miscellaneous and laboratory fees every semester, which in the case of the student came to over P7,000. Protests against the STFAP have been ongoing for years precisely for this and other flaws. In 2012, for example, about six rallies and demonstrations against STFAP—which the Philippine media, as usual, ignored—were held in various UP units as well as at the offices of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED).
But of even more fundamental concern than the unrealistic brackets of the STFAP, which in any case is currently under review, is the increasingly common view among some of its faculty and administrators that UP must be run like a corporation in denial of its essential function as a State institution of making education accessible and affordable to the qualified regardless of financial standing. This perspective has resulted in the making of inflexible bureaucracies indifferent to UP’s mandate as a national intellectual resource.
As a consequence of this inflexibility and in the context of the high tuition fees it charges, more and more students of promise are not enrolling in UP even when they pass the UP College Admissions Test (UPCAT). The exclusion of such students from UP will inevitably have an impact on its position as the country’s leading university, because, its attracting the brightest and the best being its main advantage, the increase in tuition fees has led students who would otherwise have enrolled in UP to go elsewhere.
It is true that suicide, as has been pointed out many times, is often due to a complex of reasons, about which the Philippine media are too often unaware, hence their tendency to attribute them to this or that reason alone, which in this case has resulted in UP’s being “singled out” for blame, as the UP Manila administration has lamented.
But while UP’s high tuition fees and tough rules on repayments may not have been the only reasons for the student’s suicide, they’re nevertheless likely to have been among the reasons for it. As part of the problem, UP should address not only the flaws of STFAP, or even scuttle it in favor of some other scheme, but even more fundamentally, also the attitude and perspective of some of its faculty and administrators so that the University may once more be part of the solution.
All SUCs should unite against these cuts – rationalization ang tawag nila dito. Hindi lang dapat irestore kundi dagdagan pa. indeed, the state of philippine education is depressing!