Quality higher education

WITH A new school year just underway, the issue of tuition costs has predictably surfaced once more.  A city government early this week proposed legislation to prevent private higher education institutions from raising tuition fees for a period of five years, so that students can have access to quality education.

It is not difficult to identify with the plight of parents who desperately want a college education for their children, but lack the financial resources to meet the costs.  But this move for a five-year moratorium on tuition fee increases, to be imposed by government on private schools to which they give little assistance, appears more like a ploy to get media mileage than a carefully studied plan to address the problem. We deserve more from government officials.

Already, schools have to go through hoops to be able to raise tuition fees.  They have to undertake consultations with students, a process that they must document and complete within the schedule specified by the Commission on Higher Education, to get clearance to collect tuition fee increases.  But what is the legal basis for compelling private schools to hold the price of their services constant, when the government periodically intervenes with wage adjustments and such to raise their costs?

Equally perplexing is the notion that freezing fees solves the problem of providing quality education for students. Keeping costs low would help students gain access to the schools, but will the entering freshman class benefit from the same quality education when they are seniors?  Maintaining, let alone improving, entails expenses. How does preventing schools from raising the resources to meet these costs help ensure quality education?

The Philippines, not unlike other developing countries, faces both access and quality problems. In terms of access, the problem is not so much the lack of higher education institutions (HEI); with over 2,000 colleges and universities, we have more HEI per capita than many of our Asean neighbors.

The cost of the tuition fees and of the other expenses students would need to cover is the issue.  Economic growth and rising income would hopefully address this problem.

Quality, which is the justification for the moratorium on tuition fees, would remain an issue.  The market recognizes what many officials refuse to admit that there is a trade-off between access and quality.  This is the reason why private schools can compete on the price they charge.  Even at the state universities and colleges (SUCs), tuition fee can run as low as P12 per unit to P1,000 per unit.  But the most expensive private schools charge 200 times more than the cheapest SUC.

Can one school really be 200 times inferior to another in the learning opportunities it provides?  Not if the government is doing its job.  Consumers are willing to concede the superior amenities, social connections and quality of life richer schools provide.  But they trust the government to hold schools that it allows to enroll students accountable for providing some minimum level of educational value for the hard-earned money they pay.

Defining that minimum level of acceptable quality, without which no school should be allowed to operate, must be the priority task for government.  Monitoring the school’s passing rate in licensure examinations provides one clear performance measure.  Government must ensure that schools do not game the system by preventing graduates they fear will fail the test  from taking the examination.

Ben Wildavsky, former education editor of US News and World Report, reviewed the effort of countries, developed and developing, to upgrade the quality of their higher education sector in his book “The Great Brain Race” (2010).  None of them tried to improve quality by preventing private schools from raising fees.  China did impose a five-year freeze on tuition increases, but only on public universities that it had the responsibility to support.

To raise quality, Communist China, like the capitalist countries, did not reduce, but massively increased the resources that it gave to schools.  Project 211, implemented in 1995, allocated $20 billion to 100 universities.  Project 985, launched in 1998, selected 10 elite universities to develop into elite research centers.  Beijing and Tsinghua each received $225 million over five years, while Shanghai Jiao Tong and Nanjing received $150 million each. (Wildavsky, 71-74)

The Philippines has not experienced that sustained surge of economic growth that gave China the funds to invest in higher education.  As communist and capitalist countries are doing, it must channel its limited resources to those institutions best prepared to raise their standards to international levels.  These schools can then compete, at least at the regional level, and should help strengthen other HEI in the country.

Perhaps, at some point and soon, the government can allocate more funds to improve higher education quality.  But it should not prevent the private sector from raising funds from operations to meet their own quality goals.

Edilberto C. de Jesus is president of the Asian Institute of Management.