Reduce

What was the much-vaunted Palace “communications group” doing when strikes were called and marches were held in the streets over alleged cuts in the tertiary education budget?

I should think that the role of the presidential “communications group” was to organize a quick-response when the issue began to burn. They should have put out the facts, and then the policy, through the mass media to preempt ignorant rage.

None of that happened. The strikes were called and the protests could have gained momentum. There was little in terms of “strategic messaging” visible.

All sides were dishing out half-truths.

Sen. Frank Drilon said the budget for SCUs was actually increased. The complete truth was that the item on personal services rose as a function of the scheduled upgrade in public sector pay while maintenance and operating funds were in fact reduced. Many provincial SCUs suffered hefty cuts in their maintenance and operating budgets, effectively disabling them fully discharging their mandate to provide quality education.

The militants claimed billions were cut from the SCU budget. The fact was that congressional insertions and pork-barrel allocations intended for SCU capital outlay were conditioned on the availability of revenues. Since there were no revenues to fund them in the face of chronic deficits, they were not released. This was another case of fairy-tale promised running smack into the wall of fiscal prudence.

It is to be expected that the militant agitators would skew the facts. The hairier the story they peddle, the better served agitprop will be.

The exchange of half-truths did manage to snow under the real malaise plaguing the public tertiary educational institutions. Because of the wild proliferation of SCUs the past few years, they are bound to be underfunded. Even if the budget of SCUs increased tenfold (or even a hundredfold) next year, it will still be insufficient. There are simply too many educational institutions to fund — a great number of them are in infancy, requiring huge investments in faculty build-up.

Scrambling to put out the fire that was beginning to rage in the streets, the Palace announced there would be no tuition fee increases in the SCUs. That policy is not only cowardly; it is wrong. Without improving their revenue-generation next year, those SCUs that suffered large cuts in their maintenance and operating budgets will not be able to properly function.

President Aquino himself helped compound the policy confusion on the matter. Speaking at an event at the UP Technohub, he urged SCUs to follow UP’s example and raise money for their own operations (except, presumably, through updating tuition fees). That is a good thought — except that UP is the only land-grant university with resources available for joint ventures. The 111 other SCUs are not similarly benefitted even as the UP gets the lion’s share of subsidies.

He should have come out more forthrightly by addressing the problem of proliferation and declaring he will veto any new law establishing yet another unsustainable SCU. He could come out more boldly by saying the dozens of under-qualified SCUs will be spun off for privatization. After all, there is no showing that tertiary education fares better under government control. Given the situation, it might be better to open up the tertiary education sector to “public-private partnerships.”

For over a hundred years now, the UP has done the unpatriotic thing of leaving its large land grants unutilized and depending on constantly rising subsidies from government. It took two decades of exasperating debate within UP before the Technohub deal was finally done. The leftist militants maintained that completely infantile position that using the land grants productively amounted to “commercialization” of education.

I finally found some enlightenment on the issue when CHED chair Patricia Licuanan appeared on television to discuss the matter of the SCU budget. When asked why some SCUs suffered bigger cuts than others, she admitted to a “normative formula” adopted by her agency and the budget planners. Under that “normative formula”, the SCUs that underperform will see bigger reductions in their budgets.

That is a sound strategy. Without explicitly saying that the number of SCUs will eventually be reduced, Licuanan is practically saying that the under-qualified fruits will be left to wither on the vine.

The policy of “normatively” distributing scarce funds will force existing SCUs to reorganize around their core competencies. They should not spread out their resources too thinly, vainly attempting to become a hypermarket when they should only be a specialty store. There will, after all, never be enough funds to feed 111 institutions all aspiring to be universities.

I do have some reservations about the method of starving under-qualified institutions until they regain their senses. The iron-law of bureaucracy states that no agency ever abolishes itself. It will continue to persist under the most severe budgetary constraints.

The policy must be forthright. A plan must be set down identifying, in no uncertain terms, those schools that will never prosper. They must be put on the block for privatization or outright abolition. That will be fairer to the students who today enroll and pay good money for substandard educational services. No new investments will be sunk in institutions that will never be able to deliver.

A clearly stated policy on streamlining will also signal the market that investments may now be made in an area where the private sector was once elbowed out. There will be less waste, and less heartache, in the long run.

Nothing is more efficient than a clearly stated policy — even if it might seem politically provocative. This is, after all, the stuff of transparency in governance.