Nearing enrollment for the second semester of the academic year, a youth group denounces what they deem as unfair practice of the University of Iloilo management.
The private university recently released a memo which gave an automatic incomplete grade to all students who have failed to settle their accounts. The memo was released by the school administration managed by the Phinma Education Network, a private business firm.
Taken into effect, the memo adds extra fees for students in paying 150 pesos per subject for the reprocessing of their grades. An average student takes 7 subjects per semester.
The Student Council Alliance of the Philippines (SCAP) criticized UI management for its capitalist approach towards education.
“This policy is clearly anti-student borne out of a capitalist venture within a welfare service”, remarks Joey Limson, Iloilo coordinator of SCAP. “Education is a welfare service and business interests should be relegated under the public interest”.
SCAP’s sister organization within UI, the Political Science Society, called for a dialogue between the students and the school management.
The UI-based organization is launching a signature campaign calling for a suspension of the memo. The organization also calls for CHED to intervene in order to protect students’ rights.
Kaiser Cordero, a member of the Political Science Society, reported that the memo was never circulated well among the studentry and thus caught the students by surprise.
“Our teachers can’t encode our grades because they had the system blocked”, added Cordero.
The organization’s president Karl Smith dela Peña in a Facebook post said, “the teaching pedagogy has changed drastically! It’s very obvious that the UI PEN is no longer observing the philosophy of student-teacher relation”.
“The inconvenient truth is that it’s already capitalist-clientele relation”, added dela Peña. ●
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