Too many

For two days last week, students and teachers from state universities and colleges (SUCs) held boisterous protests in their campuses and in the streets. They were protesting budget cutbacks they fear would lead to further deterioration in the quality of education and precipitate tuition fee increases.

More protests are planned for this week — even as, according to allies of the administration, the basis for them might be completely wrong.

Administration spokesmen are now telling us the budgets of SUCs have not been cut. Their funds for capital outlay coming by way of the congressional pork barrel and other insertions have been frozen, if not shelved outright. They blame an order by former president Gloria Arroyo prescribing that no such funds may be spent unless revenue sources for them have been found.

There is a bit of double-speak here. First, the new administration has the power to reverse the previous order if it wanted to, at the sacrifice of fiscal prudence of course. Second, it covers up the fact that funding for SUCs was not meaningfully increased to match inflation — creating financial tightness in the educational institutions.

Over the last few days we have seen what has become the usual mix of diverse and contradictory messages from the Palace — the result of an overpopulated “communications group.”

The President said that the SUCs should be raising money for themselves, citing UP Diliman’s Technohub joint venture. The other universities point out that, unlike UP which is a land-grant institution, they do not have similar opportunities to finance their own operations. For these other colleges, the only recourse is to raise tuition fees.

The presidential spokesperson aggravated the agitation by blaming school administrators for failing to explain the situation to their constituents. These administrators know only too well their funding requests have been rejected and they do not have enough to invest in building up talent and improving facilities. They are in the streets too, demanding more money from government.

The education authorities, implicitly admitting that the SUCs are underfunded, argue, in turn, that priority should go to the primary and secondary schools. As DepEd begins laying the groundwork for its K+12 program, it will need an enormous amount of financing that will inevitably constrict further investments in tertiary education.

No one, as far as I could see, dared to address the inconvenient truth about our public educational institutions: there are simply too many SUCs for government to adequately fund.

From a handful of state colleges and universities, the number has now ballooned to something like 111. In addition, we have colleges and universities established by wealthier local governments and funded out of their internal revenue allocation. Every governor wanted a provincial university and every congressman wanted a district college.

For years, we have allowed one state college after another to be established by law, named to honor ancestors of politicians, without minding the final costs of maintaining such a huge system. Many of these institutions are Potemkin villages: they have a few buildings and hardly any faculty to merit being called an educational institution.

A diploma from such institutions might be cheap, but they are also virtually worthless. They award degrees in bulk but hardly contribute to building up the highly-qualified talent pool our country needs to be truly competitive in this new global economy.

Building a college does not end with delineating a campus and erecting a few buildings. A strong faculty complement must be recruited and continuously trained. Operational costs will constantly increase. Proper equipment must be provided for and a library consistently maintained.

It is challenging enough that the population explosion in SUCs be maintained properly. Because of uneven political clout, the UP gets the lions share of the budget for tertiary education and the 110 others fight among themselves for the crumbs.

There is an additional complication to the proliferation of SUCs. Their rapid multiplication in only a few years served to elbow out private investments in tertiary educational institutions. That process of elbowing out private investments through the proliferation of heavily subsidized public institutions created a shortage of university places.

Add to this the migration of wealthier students to the public universities because of the rising costs of providing private tertiary education. In the same way that fast-food joints make money and restaurants lose money in a recession, better-trained students from the private high schools elbow out their inferior counterparts from the public secondary schools for places in SUCs.

 With less private universities able to deliver competitively priced tertiary education and more private high school graduates seeking to enter subsidized public universities, there is now greater demand to increase the number of places available in SUCs. In UP Diliman, where I work, the student profile changes rapidly and drastically. Where once the student population was composed predominantly of public high school graduates, these have now become an endangered species on campus.

Everything now comes to roost. We have more SUCs than the state can adequately fund. Reason dictates that we cut back the number of SUCs from current levels and reduce the volume of student intake, it is not politically feasible to do so. It is far easier to establish a new school even as future funding is uncertain than to close down an existing school because it ceased to be viable.

A tough and unpopular policy decision has to be laid down here. The state must strategically withdraw from the business of running universities — simply because doing so causes market distortions and will be always unsustainable in the long run.

I doubt, however, if that utterly necessary policy decision will ever be made.