Enough

Alex Magno
Phlippine Star

Once again, student radicals at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) assault public sensibility by pushing a valid grievance beyond the limits. They have turned the protest into an orgy, throwing equipment out of the classrooms and torching the pile.

No one will argue with the claim that the facilities in this school, as in all public educational institutions, are seriously wanting. The situation is not alleviated by burning what is already scarce.

Radicals at PUP pulled this show of vandalism once before, drawing adverse public reaction. They do not seem smart enough to alter abusive tactics.

This week, they appear to be engaged in a perverse arms race with their cousins at the UP, each trying to prove they are better vandals than the other. As the PUP militants were busy burning their own chairs, their peers at UP-Manila were happily defacing walls with spray paint and barging into the PGH, disturbing the hospital zone with their noisy clamor.

Apart from reading Mao’s Red Book, it might serve these militants well if they also leaf through Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. The latter reading will better help them advance their cause, whatever that cause might be. Vandalism was never a good medium for reshaping public convictions.

The death of Kristel Tejada is a truly sad event. It is a sharp stab at our consciences, a provocation for soul-searching. It is powerful stimulus for rethinking the way we do things, for reviewing policies and reexamining procedures.

The orgies of vandals merely distract us from properly reflecting on possible remedies within the framework of resource constraints. The bonfires lit by vandals are meant to air impossible demands, to make the problems irresolvable and to foist the opium of socialism in public campuses.

The death of Kristel, no doubt, provides rich powder for propaganda. It is a deeply emotional, highly symbolic and profoundly revolting event. It will obviously present rabble-rousers a strong temptation for doing propaganda for propaganda’s sake.

Radicals have fallen for the temptation as the events of this week make clear. Instead of looking for solutions, they have converted into a lynching mob in quest of scapegoats. They seek to repay an unfortunate death with the scalps of those who have given their very best trying to govern the ungovernable public institutions of higher learning.

The UP administration, for its part, scrapped its late payments policy. That is about as humane a solution as there could be given the circumstances. When a student has done work for the semester and could not find the financial means to complete payments by the end of the term, all the work put in should not be for naught.

It should be pointed out that the late-payments policy (where credits for a term’s work are forfeited when fees are not paid by the end of it) which might have felled Kristel is standard in all institutions, including the heavily subsidized Tesda programs where fees are truly minimal.

By scrapping this policy, the UP now sets a standard for all institutions of learning. That new standard is a challenge, to be sure. The distasteful but unavoidable matter of ensuring collection at some point will have to be worked out. Fiscal responsibility requires this to prevent our educational institutions from falling into bankruptcy.

While a term’s work will no longer be forfeited in the event of financial disability, some checks will have to be installed after the fact, such as forbidding enrollment in the succeeding term unless previous debts are settled. Otherwise, the COA will have the necks of school administrators.

We do have an underdeveloped culture of credit discipline, especially where it is public agencies that do the lending. In the course of the controversy following Kristel’s death, we find out that the CHED has been running a study-now, pay-later lending program for financially challenged students. The repayment rate, however, has been very low and the program is in clear and imminent danger of going bankrupt.

No financing scheme for higher education will last very long unless a culture of credit discipline evolves to maturity. There should be appropriate mechanisms to ensure credit discipline is observed. If there are, they have yet to be discovered.

Commercial financial institutions might have found educational lending an attractive proposition if the default rate in the CHED program was not as high. Given the risk profile of student borrowers, commercial lenders will have to charge high interest rates to cover their exposures. That will only aggravate the default rate.

We once had a workable alternative in the preneed educational plans where parents may invest forward to secure educational opportunities for their children. A wrong-headed policy change that submitted the preneed companies to the same stringent reserve requirements applying to the life insurance industry killed the former. The high-profile collapse of several preneed companies (due to misguided government policy) killed the market for educational plans.

Some candidates for the Senate have promised to legislate financing schemes for bright but poor students. Such schemes will likely meet design issues centering on financial sustainability.

The simplest (simple-minded, really) solution is socialism: provide state subsidies across-the-board. There are issues of justice here, however, since it involves heavily taxing those who are not even potential beneficiaries of the subsidies. While seductive, it has no real workable financial model that ensures sustainability.

Alas, we are left only with policy responses that will constantly seem short of the utopian goal of making tertiary education fully accessible to the poor.