Do we still need CHEd?

Does the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) still have a purpose?

For the past years, CHEd has miserably failed to implement meaningful and significant reforms in higher education. Worse, it has been reduced into a mere monitoring agency and a legal stamp pad for tuition and miscellaneous fee hike applications.

The unabated tuition and miscellaneous fee hikes and growing number of diploma mills only show that CHEd is toothless and utterly lacks the political will to stand up against abusive private school owners.

Based on the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) partial report, 458 or 32 percent of the total 1,465 private Higher Education Institutions (PHEIs) have applied for tuition hike as of May 5, 2006. This is 12.49 percent higher compared to the 276 schools or 20.49 percent of the total 1,347 PHEIs which applied for tuition increase last year, based on CHEd's partial report released in the same period in 2005. These figures confirm our long-held fear that the CHEd new guidelines on tuition hike applications or CHEd memorandum order no. 14 will only regularize yearly tuition and miscellaneous fee increases.

Unfortunately, CHEd is even seeing tuition hikes as an inevitable process or a natural phenomenon. Such framework serves its long-held axiom that quality education comes with an expensive price tag (more on how our education officials think in Miseducated’ Educators).

Our own education officials and the government perceive education as a mere “commodity for trade,” where knowledge institutions previously insulated from market forces must from now on bow to the "harsh discipline of the market." This framework goes along the present regime’s plan to eventually turnover tertiary education to the private sector and abandon its responsibility to educate its constituents, thus the yearly huge cutbacks in the state schools’ budget.

It is also the state propaganda machinery itself and its hordes of technocrats which propagates the idea that any state-run institution is bound to be inefficient, non-viable and "undisciplined" as compared to a privately run, profit-driven enterprise even as they assert that the state itself and its various functions must submit to the logic of the marketplace. Apparently, the ideal of "non-viability" is not connected to any other concept than that of “profitability."

This further translates into incentives for money-making tertiary schools, thereby fully encouraging the commercialization of education. Such belief has ensured corporate dominance even in public education.

CHEd’s uselessness is not really a result of limited power and resources. The real problem lies on how its officials actually see these fee hikes and how they view education per se.