Do not starve our SUCs

By Herman M. Lagon

Free college sounds wonderfully simple until you walk into a laboratory where equipment needs replacing, a classroom where another section must somehow fit into the schedule, or an office where students are waiting for scholarships, records, counseling, internet access and other services. Tuition may disappear from a student’s bill, but electricity does not become free. Neither do chemicals, computers, books, faculty salaries, research, buildings, fieldwork, extension work or the tricycle fare a student still has to find every morning. Somewhere behind the word free is a long list of things somebody still has to pay for.

That is worth remembering as 85 presidents of state universities and colleges (SUCs) have put their names to a unity statement seeking greater and more adequate funding for public higher education in the proposed 2027 national budget. Among other requests, they are asking Congress to restore roughly PHP 7.68 billion in proposed reductions affecting 49 SUCs, address a reported PHP 5.2 billion Free Higher Education funding deficiency for 2025–2027, adjust budgets according to actual costs and enrollment, and provide about PHP 11.51 billion in requested capital outlay.

Those are large figures, and large figures have a bad habit of becoming painless abstractions. PHP 7.68 billion is difficult to picture. A student waiting for a computer because every working unit is occupied is easier. So is a professor stretching laboratory supplies through another semester, or a university postponing repairs because something more urgent came first. Capital outlay sounds terribly bureaucratic until the capital outlay happens to be the classroom roof above your head.

The budget picture, to be fair, has another side. The Department of Budget and Management (DBM) says the proposed PHP 141.09 billion allocation for SUCs is PHP 6.099 billion, or 4.5 percent, higher than the 2026 National Expenditure Program when compared on the same basis. Against the enacted 2026 budget, however, the proposed amount is PHP 2.979 billion lower, which DBM says is largely due to nonrecurring expenditures in the current budget. The proposed allocation for free higher education in SUCs also rises by PHP 1.30 billion. These details matter. Budget debates deserve honest arithmetic, not convenient arithmetic.

Still, a higher total under one comparison does not answer the harder question: Is it enough for what we expect public universities to do? SUCs are asked to admit more students, maintain academic quality, modernize facilities, produce research, serve communities, support faculty development, strengthen student services and respond to industries that change faster than government procurement sometimes moves. Free higher education itself brings more students through the gate. Someone must make sure there are enough classrooms, teachers, laboratories, services and opportunities waiting for them on the other side.

Government, of course, cannot fund every request in full. The same national budget must support hospitals, basic education, agriculture, roads, disaster preparedness, social protection, transportation, national defense and many other legitimate needs. DBM, in fact, describes education as the largest sectoral priority in the proposed 2027 budget and has earmarked PHP 61.10 billion for the Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education program across SUCs, CHED and TESDA. Every request for additional funding should therefore survive scrutiny. But scrutiny should determine what funding is justified, not become a convenient reason for leaving genuine needs unattended.

A smaller number on a spreadsheet is not automatically efficiency. A laboratory cannot become 20 percent more efficient by wishing away 20 percent of its reagents. A growing class cannot be accommodated forever by adding chairs. A professor cannot indefinitely absorb more teaching, research, extension, administrative and student-support duties simply because the spreadsheet still balances. Our educators are remarkably good at diskarte: borrowing equipment, stretching materials, using personal laptops and finding another way when the first one is unaffordable. That resourcefulness deserves respect. But it should not become the financing model of public higher education.

That matters especially under free higher education. Removing tuition expands opportunity, but access means more than getting through the university gate. The better question is what kind of university waits when the student gets inside. Free tuition loses part of its promise when laboratories cannot keep pace, student services are stretched thin, research stalls for lack of resources, or institutions hesitate to accommodate more qualified students because capacity has reached its limit.

The unity statement goes further, proposing that PHP 107.39 billion from flood-control projects its proponents consider questionable be redirected to education and other social services. That is still a proposal for Congress to scrutinize, not money already available for transfer. Flood control is essential in a country where heavy rain can turn streets into rivers and wipe out livelihoods overnight. The issue is not whether these projects deserve funding, but whether each one is necessary, properly costed and defensible. The principle should be simple, whether for a floodwall or a university laboratory: fund what is needed, question what does not add up and make every peso count.

Here in the provinces, the argument becomes less abstract. A state university is often where a tricycle driver’s daughter prepares to become a teacher, a fisher’s son studies fisheries technology, an employee attends graduate classes on weekends, and a working student coming off the night shift rushes to a daytime class, trying to make ends meet while somehow finding enough hours to study, eat and sleep. For families like these, a public university is not an item buried somewhere in a national spreadsheet. It can be the family’s best chance at changing what the next generation will be able to do.

At ISUFST, national budget figures eventually become ordinary questions. Is the laboratory equipped? Is the internet reliable? Can research move beyond a proposal? Can faculty members keep improving their craft? Can student services keep up? Can another generation of students be accommodated without quietly asking everyone inside the University to keep doing more with less? These are hardly glamorous questions, but this is where billions written in Manila eventually become education — or fail to.

This is where accountability belongs. Let taxpayers see the journey of a public peso: from an appropriation in Manila to a microscope in a provincial laboratory, equipment in a fisheries facility, a nursing simulation room, a research project in a coastal community, or assistance that keeps a struggling student in school. Universities asking the public for more should be ready to show what the public receives in return. More funding and stronger accountability belong together. One gives institutions the capacity to work; the other helps them earn the confidence to keep doing it.

The fact that 85 SUC presidents have joined the appeal is therefore worth noticing. They lead institutions of different sizes, mandates, regions and circumstances. Their agreement does not automatically make every requested amount correct, nor should Congress approve every proposal untouched. But when leaders of very different public universities converge on the concern that resources are not keeping pace with responsibilities, the message deserves more than a quick glance at the topline budget.

After decades of working in education, I have come to see that quality often rests on very ordinary things: laboratory equipment that works, Wi-Fi that does not disappear in the middle of an exam, updated books and references, a teacher who still has time to sit with a struggling student, a guidance counselor who is there when someone is quietly having a hard time, and a classroom where teachers and students do not always have to make do with what is missing. None of these sounds grand enough for a budget speech. Together, they make a university worth attending.

That is why the call of the SUC presidents deserves serious consideration as Congress works on the 2027 budget. The question is not whether education should swallow every available peso, nor whether every university request deserves automatic approval. It is whether public higher education will receive enough to do what the country repeatedly asks of it: teach more students, produce useful knowledge, serve communities, modernize facilities, maintain quality and keep college within reach of families who might otherwise never afford it.

Free higher education, after all, was never really free. A family may no longer receive the tuition bill, but somebody still has to keep the lights on, equip the laboratory, support the teacher, fund the research and give the student an education worth waking up for — even after a night shift.

If we are serious about opening the doors of our SUCs to more Filipinos, we should be just as serious about what awaits them inside. Do not starve our SUCs. Fund them adequately, demand accountability and let every additional peso show what public education can do.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a ”student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.