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BY RHICK LARS VLADIMER ALBAY
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Saturday, February 11, 2017
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FEBRUARY — the time of the year when romantically entangled students are too busy planning elaborate Valentine’s Day surprises for their forever partners (for now, at least **insert maniacal laugh here**) and single teenagers are too distracted feeling sorry for themselves while hate-liking couple photos on Facebook to notice that their schools are posting memorandums on proposed tuition hikes.
For the record, Valentine’s Day was invented by capitalists to sell cards, flowers and hotel rooms. **Drops mic, walks out**
Anyone who even just mildly cares about their education will know that February is not just the month when sweethearts and ill-fated lovers alike are suddenly compelled to engage in public displays of affection. It’s also when colleges and universities start announcing proposals for tuition increases pending approval of the Commission on Higher Education.
Red is the official hue of the historically pagan fertility festival we now celebrate annually as the Feast of St. Valentine — the anniversary of when he was beaten with clubs, beheaded and martyred — but for a certain private school in Iloilo, black may take over as a dominant color.
This private institution has some of the highest tuition and miscellaneous fees in Panay, implementing a continuous onslaught of hikes in the past few school years. Last year, during a consultation for the proposed increases, as mandated by Republic Act 6728, the administration of this institution justified that they needed the increments to make the salaries of their teachers “competitive” with public schools, as well as other private universities, and to “[sustain] the increase in compensation of the faculty and staff.” The hike was implemented, unimpeded by CHED.
Bonus trivia: During this same consultation, a high-ranking official of the school suggested that if a student can’t afford the higher tuition, they may transfer and not bother them with complaints. A caveat: that last clause was not explicitly stated but a subtext nonetheless.
It has come to light that the faculty association of this school is now complaining because the administration never truly held up their end of the past few years’ tuition hike conditions, not executing any significant increase to their salaries. Now, in protest, the faculty members are notably wearing black bands around their sleeves while inside the campus.
Quoting from the impassioned manifesto of the faculty association, “[We] realized that the (name of school withheld) administration and its current leadership [cares] less and is ‘insensitive’ when it concerns its human resource — members of the faculty and staff, as shown by its record in applying the tuition to the basic salary and benefits of faculty and staff in the last three years (school years 2014 to 2016).”
The manifesto further states, “We reiterate and again remind our stewards here that (name of school withheld) as a ‘nonprofit, non-stock institution’ should put more premium on the economic well-being of its employees — especially the faculty — who are at the forefront of fulfilling the university’s promise of quality Christian education for life.”
Hay, during Februaries, tuition lang pala ang nagmamahal./PN
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