‘80,000 HS grads assured of scholarships’

MANILA, Philippines - Some 80,000 of the country’s best-performing high school graduates will be assured of scholarships in 112 state universities and colleges (SUCs) once the proposed Iskolar ng Bayan Act is finally approved.

“We expect the bill to breeze through the Senate-House conference panel. It is good as done,” Pasig City Rep. Roman Romulo, chairman of the House committee on higher and technical education, said yesterday.

“We want to ensure that next year’s highest-rated high school graduates will start benefiting from the scholarships,” he said.

The House of Representatives unanimously passed the proposed Iskolar ng Bayan Act on third and final reading on Wednesday, not long after the Senate approved its version of the bill.

Sponsored by Romulo, the measure installs the Iskolar ng Bayan Program, under which the top 10 graduates of every public high school would be entitled to admission to the SUC of his or her choice within his or her province, without having to pay for first-year tuition and miscellaneous fees.

Public high schools with more than 1,000 graduates would enjoy one additional college scholarship slot for every 500 graduates, to be granted to graduates whose ranks immediately follow the top 10.

“We have around 8,000 public high schools nationwide, so we expect more than 80,000 graduates every year to benefit from the program,” Romulo said.

He said after the first-year college scholarship under the program, the student beneficiary would be covered by financial assistance from the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), if qualified.

He said SUCs have a total of P3.5 billion available for scholarships in the proposed P2.6-trillion 2015 national budget.

This is on top of the CHED’s P2.2-billion allotment for student financial aid, he added.