The recent decision of the government to ensure free tuition among state colleges and universities is a noble step. But it does not answer the core problem of public higher education in the Philippines: that there are just one too many state-run schools that the country can afford.
For decades, politicians were allowed to place their self-interests at perpetuating their hold on power by the sheer privilege bestowed on Congress to approve the charter of new higher educational institutions, no matter, for example, if you have one or two in a single city. Politicians saw this as a way to ensure their constituents’ loyalty by opening state schools in their districts and offering scholarships that translated to votes during the next elections.
The rest is history: every province has at least one state college or university no matter if the quality of teaching and research has been left to suffer amidst dwindling budgets as more and more state universities sprout elsewhere.
Worse, whereas state universities and colleges should have concentrated on the production of teachers, agriculturists and engineers as indicated in their original charters, in order to serve state-run or state-managed factories and companies, they ventured into offering courses that contributed to the brain drain. Consider one state university in Cebu for example designed and named exactly for producing the best teachers in the region if not the country, churning out instead top notchers in nursing!
After realizing that nursing was the most employable program during much of the ’90s and early 2000s, many of state universities offered the course, never mind, for example, if their charter and university name clearly indicated that they should concentrate on producing agriculturist, teachers, technicians, designers, draftsmen and engineers. A teaching university in Germany or China producing nurses aside from teachers and engineers would have raised eyebrows in parliament; but not in the Philippines. After all, we are so addicted to OFW remittances: this was the most employable abroad. Thus, the original reason for existence of the state university was set aside.
In a gist, state universities started competing with private universities. Now there is nothing wrong with competition. What is patently incongruent is when instead of developing pedagogical theories and producing the best teachers for future generations, a state university also dabbles in other non-teaching programs. Or a state agricultural university produces accountants in lieu of agricultural technicians for example.
Such is the degree of incongruence between a state university’s original charter or original reason for existence, that we have so many of these universities and yet only a handful stand out for scientists and knowledge producers of international caliber within the fields required for a developing country. I can name a few: U.P. Diliman, U.P. Los Baños, Visayas State University, Central Luzon State University among them.
So much precious budgets that should otherwise have been concentrated on a few programs directly related to the needs of the particular province on which the state college or university is located is spread so thinly over so many programs that there is no more funding for original or state-of-the art research.
The short-term solution, as seen by our Senators at the moment, is to make tuition free to all students. But the long-term solution has to be to whittle down all these state colleges and universities and to pump-prime only a select number of them. There are over 200 of these state higher educational institutions right now. A reduction by a hundred and reconstitution of so many of them into a cluster is a good start. At the same time, these state universities and colleges should be told to go back to their original charters and mandates, indicating what programs they should offer in response to needs around their locales.
One need not look further than Singapore (with two state universities), which pours billions of dollars to fund research projects that produce commercially viable patents and new theories in both the natural and social sciences.
This will take political will. And the path is long, hard and arduous. But if President Rodrigo Duterte wants to leave a lasting legacy in higher education, then nothing is impossible. He can order all these state universities to terminate programs that have no bearing on their charters and spend more of their budgets elevating the quality of teaching and research in the way China has done in just two decades.
It is not enough that we borrow money from China. Perhaps we can also learn how China reconstituted its state university system to serve the needs of both the state and the people.