With free tuition law, expect tighter admission policies in SUCs —CHED

State and local government-created universities and colleges will have tighter admission and retention policies after the enactment of a law that will subsidize tuition and other fees, the Commission on Higher Education said on Thursday.

CHED Commissioner Prospero de Vera III in a briefing in Malacañang presented controlling mechanisms on the new law funding-wise.

The committee tasked to draft the implementing rules and regulation of Republic Act No. 10931 or the Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education Act, headed by Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno, met on Wednesday night.

De Vera said that the committee was planning to release the IRR within the week.

“There are other components of the law that we’re looking at including ensuring that state universities and colleges and LUCs tighten their admission and retention policies so that only students, for example, who enroll on a full load and finish their course on time will be able to access the funding assistance of government,” De Vera said.

“We will also exclude students who are doing their second degree, for example, and make sure that the enrollment of state universities, colleges and LUCs will be controlled. So we will be telling the state universities—to the SUCs and the LUCs—to make sure that their admission and retention policies do not adopt an open admission,” he added.

Transferring from private institutions to SUCs and LUCs would also be discouraged.

“The possible shift of enrollees that intend to go to private universities but will go to SUCs will probably happen only for the incoming freshmen. But for the second, third and fourth year, we are discouraging wholesale transfers from private universities to state universities and colleges ‘no,” De Vera said.

Through this, the CHED official said that the SUCs and LUCs would not use the new law to increase the number of students and get a bigger subsidy from the government, since the budget would only cover normal increase in enrollment

“There might be a temptation on the part of some state universities because there’s government subsidy to increase the number of students because they will be receiving additional funding from government,” he said.

De Vera, nonetheless, said that these admission and retention polices would be university-specific.

Only 16 LUCs

De Vera said that over P20 billion has been earmarked for the implementation of the free tuition law starting Academic Year 2018-2019.

This would be allocated to 112 SUCS, 16 LCUs, and technical and vocational institutions.

Although there are 111 LCUs in the country, only 16 have been certified as CHED compliant with CHED standards.

“So only the 16 will initially be part of the program, the others will still have to be evaluated and they come in as soon as they are certified by CHED that their programs are of quality,” he said.

“So the other ones, definitely, implementation as far as the other LUCs are concerned, will come in the succeeding months and years. They cannot be done next semester,” he added. —NB/KVD, GMA News