EDITORIAL - Education before profit

It’s not surprising that 452 private colleges and universities nationwide are increasing their tuition this school year. The peso has shed nearly a fourth of its value since last year, fuel prices continue to go up, and everyone from teachers to daily wage earners is cla-moring for a pay increase. Tuition has steadily gone up every year; the only question is by how much. Parents and student groups can only haggle about the amount of the increase. This year, the average increase is 20 percent, according to the College Editors’ Guild of the Philippines.

Every additional expense will eat into already tightly stretched family budgets. Tuition hikes won’t grate so much, however, if there are cor-responding improvements in school facilities and the quality of education. Some private schools, however, operate chiefly for profit. For such schools, a tuition increase is meant chiefly to maintain a certain profit margin, not to improve educational services. Certain universities have long been known to be nothing but diploma mills, where students can buy a degree even without attending classes.

A number of schools have consistently failed to get their graduates past professional board examinations. The government has shut down some of these schools, particularly those offering degrees in nursing and the medical profession. But such substandard schools continue to proliferate, luring students with easy entrance requirements, proximity to homes and tuition rates that are affordable compared to those in better known schools.

The result is an undereducated work force, ill-prepared for a highly competitive job market. Some of these graduates spend their family’s life savings to get a degree, only to find themselves qualified only for low-paying jobs far removed from the careers they had hoped to pursue. It won’t be so bad if such graduates are simply too lazy to get a regular education and prefer to buy a diploma. But those who pin their hopes on education to improve their lives deserve to be given a fighting chance to succeed.

One of the greatest challenges facing the nation is improving the quality of education while at the same time making it affordable to a majority of the people. If hard times give compelling reasons for a tuition increase and a yawning budget deficit makes a government subsidy unlikely, the administration should try its best to see to it that students at least get value for their money.