UP students leave classes, in protest of tuition fee hike

Hundreds of students in all campuses of the University of the Philippines boycotted their classes on Friday to protest the 300 percent increase in their tuition imposed by the UP Board of Regents (BOR) last December.

In UP Cebu College, the youth party-list group Kabataan Party, together with other student organizations led by the Nagkahiusang Kusog sa Estudyante (NKE) and the Student Council, walked out of their classrooms to demand for the recall of tuition and other fee increases (TOFI).

All wearing red, about 200 students marched around the campus and burned a large effigy of a UP enrollment form to express disgust over the UP administration's trampling of the students' right to proper consultations on the such increase.

Karlo Mikhail Mongaya, Kabataan-Cebu City coordinator and UP Cebu Student Council Chairman, said the tuition increase, which is in line with the Long Term Higher Education Development (LTHEDP) of 2001-2010, will lead to other tuition hikes in other state universities and colleges (SUCs).

"The present government's grandplan for education is not merely the neglect of education as was the analysis of previous generations of students. What we now see is the out-and-out abandonment of the responsibility to provide accessible and quality education for all," Mongaya said.

The youth leader condemned the anti-student LTHEDP, which pushed for, among others, the gigantic increases of fees in 70 percent of SUCs, making tuition equal to those of private schools, and the reduction of SUCs to 20 percent of its present number.

"TOFI is not merely a local UP issue. TOFI, which is a manifestation of state abandonment of education, is an issue of national scope that will definitely affect the future of the Filipino youth," he said.

Meanwhile, NKE spokesperson and Student Council official Ralph Sanchez said the BOR's decision to have tuition "subsequently adjusted annually based on the national inflation rate" makes UP no different from private schools where education is treated as a privilege for those who can afford rather than as a basic right.

Sanchez said the BOR has shifted the burden of subsidizing the university's expenses to the students and their parents, ending UP's thrust of providing a mass-oriented education. - Wenna A. Berondo