Mindanao Students Burdened With Tuition Fee Hikes

DAVAO CITY – The Kabataan Party List on Thursday scored the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) for being inutile in enforcing its mandate in regulating tuition and other fees increases leading to the youth’s perennial and annual problem of the rising cost of education.

“Their inutility and submissiveness of CHED to abusive private Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) has cost sweat and blood of Filipino students clamoring for accessible education,” Karla Hyasmind Apat, the party list vice president for Mindanao, said in a statement sent to the Mindanao Examiner.

Apat cited the current proposal of the local University of Mindanao (UM) administration to increase their tuition and miscellaneous fees by 11.36%.

Davin Acuram, president of the College Student Government, said the school administration reasoned out that the tuition fee increase was prompted by the escalating prices of commodities.

However, Acuram argued that the administration lacks genuine consultation from the stakeholders of the University especially the students who will be most affected of the increase.

“For one, they failed to post a public notice that a consultation regarding the increase will take place,” Acuram said.

He said that participants to the supposed consultation were limited to less than 15 participants coming from the college student government, council of student organizations, council of fraternities and sororities and the supreme faculty council.

“Worse, there was no audited financial statement that was shown to us to present where the increase in tuition last year went,” Acuram said.

CHEd Memo Order No. 14 ensures that copies of the school’s latest audited financial statement and tuition utilizations must be furnished to the student representatives during consultations.

“In this case however, there was no financial statement presented to us,” Acuram said.

Political Science student Winston Concoles, who is also the Kabataan coordinator, said if the proposed tuition hike is approved the UM students would have to pay P325 per unit upon enrollment from P275 per unit last year.

“We are faced with the yearly increase in tuition and we hold the CHED accountable for it because it is their mandate to regulate increases. But we don’t see CHED favoring the students instead they are favoring Higher Education Institutions (HEIs),” Concoles said.

“CHED seems to institutionalize the annual increase without due consideration that Filipino students and their families cannot afford such increases because of the increasing gap between the price of education and the capacity of the Filipinos to spend on it,” Apat said.