After months-long deliberations, the Multi-Sectoral Consultative Committee on Tuition Fees (MSCCTF) has settled on a five-percent tuition fee increase (TFI), effective academic year (AY) 2024-2025 upon the approval of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED).
In a town hall meeting on March 13, the student, parent, and faculty sectors declared that the role to deliver given the increase is now in the hands of the University administration. Provost Dr. Robert Roleda assures that each penny will finance the University’s long-overdue developments.
Responding to drawbacks
Higher education institutions such as DLSU are required to allocate 70 percent of their tuition fee increases to salaries, as stipulated in Republic Act No. 6728, or the Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education Act. The rest of the increase, according to Roleda, mainly goes to operations and developments, including research, scholarships, the Lasallian mission, social engagement, and activities, among others.
The Provost also discloses that the University is currently incurring deficits to catch up to its infrastructural delays, some of which have been on hold for as long as eight years, which is why the administration expects to spend every last dime of its collections for the next year’s projects.
“We need to do a lot of [catching] up in terms of infrastructure to improve our facilities…Because of the good financial year in [AY] 2022-2023, we’re now able to think [of] things that we need to spend on, so escalators, elevators, repainting of our buildings, the gates, our computer, our tele, our IT, so many things to really improve on,” Roleda shares.
DLSU has greenlit numerous construction projects over the years, including the three-phase construction of the St. Marie Mutien Hall in the Manila Campus and the University Hall and Enrique K. Razon Jr. Hall in the Laguna Campus. Road developments and learning facility renovations have also been launched and finished over the past year.
Roleda also says that they are making sure that next year’s TFI will not encounter roadblocks. This academic year, the TFI for Term 1 was only implemented in February, during Term 2. He explains that this is because some increases they proposed on miscellaneous expenses were well beyond the eight-percent benchmark set by CHED.
“This year, we tried to make sure that we don’t exceed…the benchmark of CHED because normally, those benchmarks are not announced until later after our negotiations, so we have to kind of predict [the benchmark], which is [usually based on] the previous year’s inflation,” Roleda details.
Deliberation process
Roleda describes the deliberations on whether to implement a TFI as a gauge of each sector’s response to the country’s economic phenomena, where students and parents are expected to at least maintain payables with a zero-percent TFI while faculty and employees do the opposite to further support their expenses.
“The call for tuition fee increase is driven by the need to cope with inflation…Of course, the University will also have to deal with inflation in its operations so that’s also part of the things that we consider, but we also are very mindful as a University not to have fees that are too high that Lasallian education becomes inaccessible,” he elaborates.
During deliberations presided by DLSU Parents of University Students Organization (PUSO), the Association of Faculty and Educators of DLSU, Inc. (AFED) and the DLSU Employees Association are the ones to present first, followed by DLSU PUSO and the University Student Government (USG); then, the administration mediates to merge the sectors to a consensus.
For this year’s discussions, AFED and EA merged on a 9.21-percent TFI in hopes of offsetting the economic setbacks during the last year, while the students and parents submitted separate zero-percent TFI proposals, arguing that the administration can still meet sectoral demands and manage operations even without a TFI.
The USG bolstered its campaign through a series of initiatives such as surveys and focus group discussions that supplemented its proposal to the MSCCTF.
AFED President David Michael San Juan, in the March 13 town hall meeting, remarked that there is “no ideal or perfect situation” when it comes to deciding on tuition fee increases, as the goal is always to meet midway, which is why everything rests on implementation.
Moving forward, the USG is coordinating with the University administration in setting up more payment platforms for Lasallians, improving transparency initiatives under the administration, and opening more scholarship and subsidy opportunities for students. Meanwhile, DLSU PUSO is open to extending financial assistance to some Lasallians and to USG initiatives. AFED vows to deliver quality teaching to Lasallians.
As for the University administration, they aim to keep each peso well-spent by heeding the calls of Lasallians for better facilities, study areas, and systems.
“There are a lot of things that we have to improve, especially facilities…But rest assured, it’s (the budget) always going back to improving the quality of education, the learning environment, and…the scholarships…so that we can make Lasallian education accessible to even more Filipinos,” Roleda vows.
This article was published in The LaSallian‘s June 2024 issue. To read more, visit bit.ly/TLSJune2024.
