Romulo calls for more reforms to help nation’s college students
Senatorial candidate Roman Romulo yesterday said he will keep pushing for educational reforms, particularly on the tertiary level, should he gain a seat in the Senate.
Meeting with the Manila Bulletin’s (MB) senior editors at a roundtable discussion, Romulo stressed the importance of giving financially
challenged but deserving high school students access to quality college education.
Romulo was chairman of the House Committee on Higher and Technical Education and among the things he learned was the big difference between the number of high school graduates and the number of those who go on to college.
“We got a steady number of those who enter college which is 700,000. But that’s only almost half of our high school graduates,” Romulo said. The Constitution, he said, does not provide free college education, only free basic (elementary and high school) education.
During his stint as Pasig City’s lone district representative, Romulo said, he filed five bills aimed at providing assistance to students – Open Distance Learning (ODL), Ladderized Education (LE); “Iskolar ng Bayan,” Unified Student Financial Assistance System for Tertiary education (UniFAST), and Voluntary Student Loan Programs. The first four bills get enacted into law.
Under the ODL Act, the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) was mandated to accredit programs and colleges and universities in the Philippines that will be authorized to provide bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees online.
This will help our overseas Filipino workers ( OFWs), be an alternative for the persons with disabilities (PWDs), and also be an additional option for Filipinos who already have to work for themselves and their families, thus unable to attend regular classes, he said.
The LE Law directed CHED and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) to cooperate with one another and determine which technical vocational courses may be given college credits.
The Iskolar ng Bayan Law provides that all top 10 graduates of all public high schools in the country will be automatically included in the government’s roster of scholars, if they enroll in a state university or college within the region.
“We expected close to 80,000 beneficiaries, but unfortunately, only 12,000 availed of it,” Romulo said. One of the reasons, he said, may have been poor information dissemination.
Romulo said that the UniFAST Law calls for a central databank to keep track of all government financial assistance programs to college students. “I authored this law because I noticed that we have so many scholarships and grants- in-aid being funded nationally, but no databank that keeps record of how many and who benefitted, and what happened to them later on,” Romulo said.
All of the nationally funded scholarships and grants-in-aid have been put under a UniFAST Board co-chaired by the heads of CHED and the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), with the heads of DepEd, TESDA, Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), and Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) as members. With the structure in place, Romulo said, government assistance to college students will be systematized and reach more of those who need help.