WB tells PHL: Spend more on basic education, less on tertiary schools

Well-to-do students tend to enjoy a chunk of government subsidies for college education that government must spend less on tertiary education and more on primary and secondary schools, a World Bank (WB) review has recommended for the Philippines to pursue.

In its 2010 Philippine Public Expenditure Review presented Thursday in Quezon City, the WB said that government spending on both elementary and secondary education is progressive, or tilted towards the poor. Expenditures for state colleges and universities (SCUs), on the other hand, turned out to be regressive, or tilted toward the rich.

Rosario Manasan, author of the chapter on government equity on education spending and health, cited the enrolment in SCUs, such as the University of the Philippines, as an example of the regressive state-run tertiary schools.

She said the key to eventually boost the population of poor students in SCUs is to pour more government funds into public elementary and secondary schools. Manasan said fewer students from poor families attend basic schooling.

Less poor students in schools

The Annual Poverty Indicators Survey (APIS) of the National Statistics Office, which the WB presented in its review, shows a trend in the attendance of poor and non-poor students in grade school and high school.

In the primary level in 2007, the APIS shows an 85.9-percent participation rate among the poor, and 91.8 percent among the non-poor. Secondary schools, meanwhile, had a participation rate of 51.4 percent among the poor, as opposed to 76.5 percent among the non-poor.

The APIS defines “poor” as the lowest 30 percent of families when it comes to per capita income distribution. The “non-poor,” on the other hand, refers to the upper 70 percent.

“So naturally, mas konti ‘yung poor na makakarating sa(… fewer students from poor families will reach…) college,” she said.

Gaps were wider in college, based on 2007 data, with 8.7 percent participation by the poor and 27.7 percent by the non-poor.

Compared to four other countries in Asia — Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam — the Philippines posted the lowest enrolment rate in 2007 at 91 percent. Malaysia topped the list at 97 percent, followed by Indonesia at 95, Thailand at 94, and Vietnam at 93.

The enrolment rates mostly matched each country’s level of spending from 2002 to 2007.

The Philippines spent the least at 2.5 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). The biggest spender in education was Malaysia at 4.6 percent of GDP, then Thailand at 4.3, and Indonesia at 4.5. Data for Vietnam were unavailable.

Subsidies are ‘difficult to justify’

The WB recommended that government raise spending on basic education to around 1.7 percent of the GDP.

The multilateral lender says higher subsidies for SCUs are “difficult to justify.” Aside from the higher number of well-to-do students enrolled in SCUs, the WB says the “returns to higher education are internalized by students themselves.”

Manasan explained that college is different from basic education in that the latter grounds students on basic concepts like good citizenship.

“‘Pag nag-graduate ka ng college, ang effect no’n hindi na ‘yung citizenship, but that you are able to get a higher paying job (Once you graduate from college, the effect of that is no longer on the citizenship…),” Manasan said.

Still, the WB recommendation is “misleading” because it pits two essential services against each other, said Terry Ridon, national chairman of the League of Filipino Students, in an interview with GMA News Online.

Government may consider diverting funds not from any one of the two education systems — basic or tertiary — but from other beneficiaries of government funds such as the conditional cash transfer (CCT) program and military services, he said.

“Both [systems] ought to be adequately funded by the government,” Ridon said. — VS, GMA News