EDITORIAL - Additional burden

Parents will have to deal with another round of tuition fee increase when sending their children to school next month.

This after the regional office of Commission on Higher Education announced last week that at least 18 tertiary schools in Central Visayas are set to implement a tuition hike this school year.

Data from CHED-7 showed that ten of these colleges are based in Cebu while one is being run by the government. While the record showed that there are 18 colleges granted with tuition increase, CHED regional director Amelia Biglete only announced the names of 16 schools during a radio interview last week.

Biglete explained that CHED granted the applications by these tertiary schools for a tuition hike as they wanted to increase the salaries of their teachers, and improve their facilities.

She, however, expressed elation that all schools in the region heeded calls from CHED not to increase the tuition last school year. This is the reason, she said, why they granted applications for tuition hike this school year.

Earlier, the Department of Education-7 announced that up to 95 private pre-elementary, elementary and secondary schools in the region have been allowed to implement fee increase this school year.

DepEd regional director Recaredo Borgonia admitted the department cannot stop these schools from hiking fees as long as they comply with all the requirements. But he added these tuition increases are reasonable.

While we cannot dispute the fact that these tuition fee increases are needed to sustain the operations of those schools, we cannot also deny the fact that they are additional burden to the parents.

Given the already high tuition, many parents could no longer afford to send their children to college. Some of them are now just content in seeing their children joining the labor force after finishing high school.

In this country nowadays, it seems that acquiring the right education is no longer a right for Filipinos. Those who have the means will only have the privilege of attaining it.

The law states that education should be available to all. But in these hard times, it has long ceased to be on the priority list of many Filipinos.