The Commission on Higher Education or CHED has approved the tuition fee increase of over 80 schools all over the Metro. Even the University of the Philippines will be increasing its fees by more than 300% from P300 (US$ 6) to P1000 (US$ 20) per unit for incoming Freshmen for the incoming year. Note that this increase is only for the tuition fees, most of these schools, including UP, will be increasing miscellaneous fees, lab fees and possibly more.

While I have to admit that schools do need to adjust to the inflation rate (and UP has not adjusted its fees for over 20 years) it is truly sad that Higher Education is still a luxury for a majority of Manilenos. Just chalk this up to the 88 out of the 299 schools in Metro Manila that will be hiking their tuition fees and you will have an even sadder state of the country’s education system.

If that’s not clear to you, let’s look at the minimum wage earner (P300 + P50 COLA) who earns an income of P127,400 annually without tax and with 13th month (that’s US$ 2,540 a year). Given this annual family income, they will fall into Bracket D and pay only P300 per unit (the current rate) for their UP scholar.

Next we assume that the student enrolls in 24 units and has a daily allowance of P100 (for books, food, etc), that gives us a total annual cost of P35,200 inclusive of the P7,800 tuition fee (without miscellaneous fees). Deduct the annual cost of education from the annual family income we get P92,200, this means that the family can only live on P256 a day that’s less than US$6 a day for a family of three.

More information:
88 Metro schools hike fees by 10%
Open Letter to the UP Community on the Proposed Tuition Fee Increase

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