Atty. Gregorio B. Austral, CPA
The real cost of free college education
We welcome the opening of school year 2022-2023 with high hopes that everyone able and willing to obtain a college diploma will get it for free, at least from state universities and colleges (SUCs) and local universities and colleges (LUCs).
The Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education Act (Republic Act No. 10931) has been in full force few years ago. The law aims to promote social justice and the advancement of nation building recognizes the inalienable right of all Filipinos to quality education and thus protects and promotes the right of all Filipino students to accessible quality education.
The law ordains that “all Filipino students who are either currently enrolled at the time of the effectivity of the Act, or shall enroll at any time thereafter, in courses leading to a bachelor’s degree in any SUC and LUC shall be exempt from paying tuition and other school fees for units enrolled in.”
At face value, the law seems to be a very laudable piece of legislation because the state now offers college education for free. As its title suggests, the law aims to give a universal access to quality tertiary education and, as its provisions show, “universal access” means free college education in SUCs and LUCs.
Although the law is passed as a social justice legislation, it is feared to widen the gap between the rich and the poor because the people who are given better access to the program are the rich and the middle-class families rather than the poor.
The law completely ignores the sound “user-pay” principle and adopts the populist policy of giving untargeted tuition subsidy for all students in the SUCs and LUCs. Under the “user-pay” principle, nonpoor families who access tertiary education must shoulder its cost because these families are the ones directly and largely benefited by service. If the state offers untargeted free college education, it makes use of taxpayers’ money to finance the education of children from the rich and poor families. Given the limited capacity of SUCs and LUCs to accommodate students, this limited resource funded by taxpayers’ money will have to be allocated using a rational basis. Under the law, only those who pass the competitive entrance examination will be admitted and given free college education. Using this basis for allocation, there is a tendency that students from rich families will edge out those from poor families since the former are privileged to have a better foundation in their elementary and secondary education.
We are all aware that tuition, miscellaneous and other fees are not the only cost of college education. In fact, it is a smaller fraction compared to living allowance and instructional materials. The law now creates a situation whereby it finances around one-third of the cost of education and leaves the other two-thirds for the family to shoulder. Under this situation, only the rich and the middle-class families have the capacity to support the other cost of college education leaving it nearly impossible for poor families to sustain the tertiary education for their children.
In a policy note prepared by Aniceto C. Orbeta Jr. and Vicente B. Paqueo for the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) citing a five-year study by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), it is shown that the bulk of students in public higher education institutions (HEIs) are mostly from the higher income groups. Students from poor households (poorest and second poorest income deciles or collectively the bottom 20%) are only 11 percent in 1999 and 12 percent in 2014 of the total enrolled students. This trend had not changed much through the years despite the expansion of enrollment in public HEIs from 35 percent in 1999 to 52 percent in 2014. Thus, giving free tuition to enrolled students in SUCs will benefit mostly the richer students.
With this state policy of giving free college education to all, rich or poor, there will be an exodus of rich students to our SUCs and LUCs since the cost of education is partly subsidized by the government. How many students can our SUCs and LUCs afford to accept without unduly sacrificing other equally important government services? If these institutions do not limit their enrollment, in the very near future, our government coffers will be depleted and there is no other way to finance this program except to let the cost of free college education be shouldered by the taxpaying public. Assuming enrollment is limited, students from the rich and middle-class families will further dominate our SUCs and LUCs.
For all those who believe that college education is now free, suffice it to say that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The taxpayers are the ones paying for this magnanimous act of the government. As the SUCs and LUCs welcome more and more students, it gives more pressure to our government to impose more taxes to finance this unsustainable government program.
We believe that the noble purpose of the law, that is to promote universal access to tertiary education, is not justified by the means of indiscriminately giving free college education. Government should not finance the education of the rich. To bridge the gap between the rich and the poor, the law should target the poor as the primary beneficiaries of free college education.
College education can never be free. Under this government program, the poor are still being left out to suffer from inequity, lack of access, and lack of opportunity. If poverty breeds ignorance, why do we give free education to the rich instead?