Friday, February 01, 2008 College studes protest tuition hike
STUDENTS from state colleges and universities in the Southern Mindanao region will walkout from their respective schools and bring their protest in the streets Friday.
In a press conference last Monday, the National Union of Students in the Philippines (NUSP) urged students to take part in the walkout as protest against relentless and unjustifiable increases in the tuition and other school fees.
In Davao City, students from the University of the Philippines in Mindanao and University of Southeastern Philippines -- Obrero and Mintal Campuses will spearhead the move and will be joined by student-supporters from private schools including Ateneo de Davao University, University of Mindanao, Brokenshire College, Philippine Women's College, Holy Cross of Davao College and STI College. The Cotabato Polytechnic University and the University of Southern Mindanao in Kabacan are also joining the protest.
Makpil Zarrin Dem Camacho, University of the Philippines-Mindanao Student Council president and Vice-President for Mindanao of NUSP, said the walk out is the students' way of strongly protesting against the government's continued commercialization of education.
The commercialization Camacho said is a move that deprives millions of poor Filipinos to access free education.
Ateneo's official publication, Atenews, and Future Educators of Ateneo (Feat), conducted a forum among Ateneo students Wednesday to highlight the worsening situation of the Philippine educational system in relation to the difficulty of Filipino children and youth to access free education.
"The government's commercialization of a constitutional right is unspeakable... The continued increase is a pathetic admission that this government cannot serve the people...it is an admission of their failure and inutility," Camacho continued.
Data from the Department of Education on the situation of Filipino youth is a giveaway of the problem.
As of 2006, only 66 of the 100 grade 1 entrants finish elementary and only about 58 are able to reach high school level while only 23 proceed to college. Of the 23, only 14 of them get to end up with college degrees. The same data issued by DepEd, under the command of former Secretary Jesli Lapuz, indicated that at least 1 million Filipino youth are unable to get high school education.
Today, students from the regional UP campuses of Mindanao, Visayas, Baguio and Pampanga are paying P600 per unit while those who are studying at UP's Diliman, Manila and Los Banos campuses pay P1,000 per unit. (Press release)
