Subsidizing tuition

EDITORIAL

The Department of Education is mulling over entering into more service contracting schemes with private schools to absorb more than a third of the expected one million students who will be entering senior high school in 2016.

The two years of senior high school—Grades 11 and 12—that will be added to the 10-year basic education curriculum will be implemented nationwide beginning June 2016.

Education Secretary Armin Luistro said they estimated that about a million students in the public schools would be graduating from Grade 10 or 4th year high school in March 2016.

If all of them will go on to the public schools (for Grade 11), the government needs to build classrooms for one million students, accoding to Luistro, by 2017, the public school system will again have to find a way to accommodate the same number students—about one million—for Grade 12. “We have to compute the additional teachers and classrooms needed based on this number.”

The education secretary said accommodating these students in private schools would be less costly than building new classrooms and facilities, procuring furniture and hiring more teachers.

The DepEd said it currently subsidizes the tuition of about 700,000 students in private high schools under the education service contracting scheme (ESC).

What is strange is no student in northern Luzon had been a beneficiary of this program. How does the DepEd distribute and accou t for the money under the ESC?  

The ESC is a program under the Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education (GASTPE) for students who could not be accommodated in public high schools and are therefore enrolled in private schools with a government subsidy.

The current annual subsidy is P10,000 per student in private schools in Metro Manila and P6,500 per student in participating schools outside Metro Manila.

“We’ll be happier if we have to build fewer classrooms. The government will be able to save more by giving subsidies instead,” Luistro said, explaining that the cost of keeping a student in the public school system is P14,000 a year.

He said two months ago, they estimated private schools may be able to absorb about 30 percent, or 300,000, of the incoming one million Grade 11 students. “I wish the figure in the private schools will increase to 60:40 (60 percent for public schools and 40 percent for private schools).”

 Public elementary and high schools will open on June 3 while many private schools are scheduled to open a week later.