CONGRESS must immediately enact a measure that would allow poor students to avail themselves of loans so they could study in college, a former socioeconomic planning secretary said last week.
Dante Canlas, former National Economic and development Authority director general, said this should be financed by taxes, similar to the "sin” tax that funds health programs.
"We know that higher education is internally financed by households. There are no markets for education loans so even if you pass University of the Philippines or another institution of higher learning, you cannot finance your education. That’s just too bad,” Canlas said in his presentation at the inaugural policy forum of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS).
"So, access to college is based on the ability to pay, not on the ability to learn. So what happens is that society loses bright young talents who will be foregoing higher education,” he said.
Canlas said having a student-loan program will help promote distributive justice in higher education and build a stock of highly educated workers for the country.
Currently, the Unified Student Financial Assistance System for Tertiary Education (UniFAST Act) authored by Sen. Sonny Angara has been approved on third and final reading at the Senate.
UniFAST aims to expand the country’s government-funded scholarship program.
It covers student loans, subsidized tuition, and outright free tuition for poor but deserving students.
Neda Director General Arsenio M. Balisacan said investing in education is one way by which the country can achieve inclusive growth.
He said that inequality in the country is still high with its gini coefficient–a measure of inequality–still high at 0.45 to 0.46. A gini coefficient of one represents perfect inequality, while zero represents equality.
Balisacan said investing in human capital can help promote inclusive growth. He said this is one way that poor Filipinos participate in and benefit from the country’s economic success. He said programs that invest in human capital include the expanded Conditional Cash-Transfer (CCT) Program which has grown in budget by more than 500 percent since 2010 and now covers more than 4 million beneficiary households from only 630,000 in 2009.
The CCT, Balisacan said, is already one of the largest in the world and has demonstrated early gains in improving outcomes for poor children, particularly in increasing enrollment and attendance in school.
"We must continuously identify and implement educational reforms, enhance work-force competencies, align education and training programs to respond to industry requirements, provide training programs to upgrade skills that can reduce job-worker mismatches, and further equalize opportunities,” Balisacan said.
The PIDS annual conference aims to bring together key experts in the fields of economics, political science, public administration, and sociology to flag to policymakers critical issues that must be addressed in the immediate term.//
Congress needs to enact law providing college-student loans
