The Philippines had seen various events recently that have something to do with policies on tuition fees in different universities in the country.
These issues stirred from the suicide incident of a Behavioral Science freshman of the University of the Philippines (UP) in Manila, where her failure to pay the university’s tuition fee is suspected to be the cause of her taking her own life.
In another state university, students from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) disrupted classes, threw out chairs, tables and other school properties, and put them on fire after the suicide story broke out, showing their outrage and condemning the incident.
The students involved in the violent incident might face suspension or expulsion according to PUP management.
On the same week, a man who allegedly had difficulty paying his child’s tuition took hostage a sacristan inside a church in Quezon City.
Police was able to pacify the hostage taker and arrested him eventually. They recovered a P14, 738.18 receipt from the Southern Luzon State University in Lucban, Quezon, where his child was said to be studying.
Amidst the recent happenings, a total of 95 schools, colleges, and universities in the National Capital Region (NCR) intend to increase tuition in the coming school year as revealed by the Commission on Higher Education (CHED).
The said tuition fee increase was again confronted by a protest by student groups in which they said that the fee hikes are baseless, unjustified and there were no proper consultations with students and parents.
Meanwhile the recent events have sparked different opinions to the public. Some have seen them as major loopholes in the education system of the country. Others view them as wrong implementation of certain school policies that needed for a review and reexamination, while others consider them as too much, especially to those who vandalized and destroyed school properties.
