The Negative Effects of Tuition Fee
Increase to the Academic
Performance of First Year Students of the University of Mindanao
GROUP 6

Setting

Problem

The Problem And Its Setting
Tuition fees are fees charged for instruction during higher education. Tuition payments are charged by educational institutions in some countries to have funding on school equipment, staffs, teachers, and facilities to provide a comfortable learning experience. In some countries there are no or only nominal amount of tuition fees in all forms of education, including Universities and higher education institutions. In a country like the Philippines tuition fee is a very sensitive thing for every
Filipino once it increases a wave of reaction follows. It’s no surprise since the country is still in developing state and probably millions still under the poverty line defining the economic status of every Filipino. When we have a closer look of the problem you probably see the reality in which it affects as much as tuition fee is concerned, the academic performance of students.

Students who choose to stay in school may have to work longer hours at more demanding jobs to cover their expenses. This can interfere with academic performance. A
2002 study by the State Public Interest Research Group's Higher Education Project found that working full-time can harm grades. Forty-two percent of survey respondents reported that working hurt their academic progress, and 53 percent reported that work limited the classes they could take (Global Post ).
In United States, tuition increase have caused chronic controversy since shortly after World War II. It was during a time when the workforce was slow from the aftermath of war and higher education was blooming in order to pursue more knowledge in hopes of finding a successful, stable career. Many families went into debt in order to pay for their children to attend college. Except for its military academies, the U.S. federal government does not directly support higher education. Instead it offers loans and grants, dating back to the Morrill during the U.S. Civil War and the “G.I. Bill" programs implemented after World War II. (Wikipedia).

In Japan, national universities charge each freshman yearly a tuition of 820,000 yen, and private universities charge 1,310,000 yen on average. Since 1970, the amount of payment has increased 51 times in the case of national universities and 5.7 times in the case of private universities. Today, 70 percent of Japanese students go to private universities. In the case of a private university student living alone in the Tokyo area, the amount of money that can be spent for his/her living expense (i.e. the amount of money he/she receives from parents minus rent) has decreased in ten years from 68,200 yen a month to 42,700 yen, a record low since the survey began in 1986. The recent decline in parents' incomes contributes to the increasing hardship of these students. Internationally, fifteen out of 30 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) do not charge tuition. France charges only an enrollment record fee of 19,000 yen.
Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark have established higher education free of charge even without charging an enrollment fee.(Japan Press)

In the past fifteen years, tuition fees in Canada have grown to become the single largest expense for most university and college students. The dramatic tuition fee increases during this period were the direct result of cuts to public funding for post-secondary education by the federal government and, to a somewhat lesser extent, provincial governments. Public funding currently accounts for an average of approximately 57 percent of university and college operating funding, down from 80 percent just two decades ago. During the same period, tuition fees have grown from 14 percent of operating funding to over 35 percent.
This constitutes a rapid re-orientation of Canada’s post-secondary education system away from a publicly funded model and towards a privatized, user fee system. Rapidly increasing tuition fees have caused post-secondary education to become unaffordable for many lowand middle-income Canadians. Recent studies reveal the effects of high tuition fees on access to post-secondary education for students from low- and middle-income backgrounds. Statistics Canada reports that students from low-income families are less than half as likely to participate in university than those from high-income families.

Statistics Canada’s Youth in Transition Survey tallied the reasons cited by high school graduates who did not participate in post-secondary education.
By an overwhelming margin, the most frequently reported barrier to university and college for these students was “financial reasons”. University of British
Columbia researcher Lori McElroy found that students with little or no debt were more than twice as likely to finish their degree than students with high levels of debt. The completion rate for students with under $1000 of debt was
71 percent, while the completion rate for those with over $10,000 was 34 percent. Similar results were found in the United States. Researchers at the
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) found that for every $1,000 increase in tuition fees, enrolment rates dropped by 15 percent. The study demonstrated that the decrease in enrolment was composed “almost exclusively from minority and low-income students”(cfs-fcee.ca).

In a report from South Korea, they looked at case studies over 15 years (1995-2010) from nine countries – Austria, Canada, England, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, and South
Korea. These countries represent very different experiences. Some have private higher education, others don’t. Some have public sectors that change fees, while others don’t (Hungary and Poland are in the middle, where public universities provide education free for some while charging for others). And looking across all the different cases, they found the following:
1)
Most tuition increases have no perceptible effect on enrolment. The only cases where clear-cut effects could be discerned was in England in 2012, where the increase was about $10,000 in a single year, and in the de-regulation of professional fees in Ontario in the mid-90s (where, bizarrely, low-income students were not affected, but middle-income students were).
2)
That said, there are also some clear-cut cases where tuition has been a driver of increased access. In both
Poland and South Korea, major increases in enrolments were driven by the existence of fee-supported places
(mainly but not exclusively in private institutions).

3)
Though this is partly a matter of many countries having education data-sets that make Canada’s look enviable, there is very little evidence that changes in fees have done much to change the composition of the student body. In every country where there is data, underrepresented groups have done better over time, regardless of the fee regime. Even in the extreme case of England 2012, under-represented groups (the poorest income quintile, black and Asian students) tended to be less affected by the tuition increase than richer, whiter students. (The one exception here is older students, who were disproportionately affected by the changes.) To the extent that late-entrants to higher education come from poorer backgrounds, this should be seen as a kind of hidden socio-economic effect of fees.
4)
Changes in tuition fees seem to have had no discernible effects on students’ choice of major, and few discernible effects on students’ decisions about where to study (in Canada, for instance, rates of out-ofprovince study are actually up over the last decade).
5)
It is not so much that fees themselves have no effect; rather, it is that in nearly all cases, fees are introduced with accompanying increases in student aid. Sometimes it is paltry compared to the size of the fees required (e.g. South Korea in the 90s), sometimes it is implemented in a fairly clunky way (Germany, mid2000s). But it is always there to offset the worst effects of fees. And in the case of England 2012, it was there to ensure that students weren’t required to pay a single extra penny of costs up-front, which seems to have had a major factor in limiting the impact of the world’s largest-ever tuition increase (in the short-term at least)(higheredstrategy.com). In the Philippines, around 400 universities and colleges intend to increase tuition and other school fees for academic year (AY) 2015-2016. This, according to the data gathered by the Tuition Monitor Network of the
National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP), the largest and broadest alliance of more than 650 student councils/governments and federations in the country. NUSP is alarmed by the yearly increases characterized as
“inhumane, incessant and anti-student.” Tuition Increase Up To 13%; Other School Fees Increase Up to 20%
According to NUSP’s latest tuition monitor data, the proposed increases in tuition range up to 13% while proposed other school fees increases reached 20%. But this may change as reports of increases are still pouring in. NUSP disclosed that most of the schools that increased last year have again proposed another round of fees increases and imposition for the academic year 2015-2016.
Among the schools proposing to increase tuition and other school fees for the upcoming academic year are
De La Salle Araneta University (DLSAU), University of the East (UE) Manila and Caloocan campuses, University of
Santo Tomas (UST), Collegio De San Juan de Letran (CSJL), National Teachers College (NTC), Miriam College (MC),
Manuel Enverga University Foundation (MEUF), Saint Louis University – Baguio (SLU) Ateneo de Naga University
(AdNU), La Consolacion College – Iriga (LCC), University of San Carlos (USC), Cebu Normal University (CNU),
Mindanao Polytechnic College (MPC), and Ateneo de Zamboanga University, among others. Harassment of
Student Leaders Opposed to Tuition Hikes Related to the incessant yearly tuition and fees hikes, NUSP has also gathered cases of violations of student rights by school administrators, foremost of which are harassment of student leaders who are against tuition and other school fees increases. Very recently, last February 17, 2015, the day of UE Caloocan’s “student consultation” for the proposed tuition increase, UE Caloocan student leader Mark
Matibag, was unduly sent to the university’s Student Affairs Office (SAO) for interrogation due to his stand against the proposed tuition increase. Matibag’s identification card was confiscated and he was ordered to leave the school premises because he was identified as leading the students opossed to tuition and other school fees hikes.
Matibag’s is a clear case of political harassment to students who are exercising their freedom to dissent.

Last year, Mr. James Deang, outgoing President of the National Univesity Supreme Student Council
(NUSSC), was stripped of his scholarship due to his staunch stand against tuition and other school fees imposition in their university. In the Eulogio Amang Rodriguez Institute for Science and Technology (EARIST),
Manila, a number of student leaders were blacklisted from enrolling due to their involvement in the massive student walkout against EARIST’s collection of the illegal development fee. Aside from the development fee, other illegal, redundant and dubious fees were reported by NUSP: energy fee, developmental fee, spiritual fee, enhancement fee, life-long development fee, air conditioning fee, P fee, athletics fee, intramurals fee,
.E.
Land, Infrastructure, Maintenance and Acquisition Development fee, Visual Aids Development Fee, Internet
Fee, Lifelong Relations Fee, Tree Planting Fee, Drug Testing Fee, Certification of Fees, and Out of State Fees, among others. NUSP has time and again raised to the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) the illegality and questionability of these fees, but CHED has remained “inutile” and “negligent” of delivering justice to these cases. These fees are among the long-overdue issues hounding students and parents.
“Administration-sponsored consultation for the longest time has evolved into a mere justification and presentation of fees. We have had enough of this scheme! Skyrocketing tuition increase under the guise of
“development” actually kills students’ and youth’s right to accessible and quality education,” says Ms. Sarah
Elago, NUSP National President (NUSP).

In Davao City, as the Commission on Higher Education’s deadline for submission of intent to increase tuition and other fees closed last February 28, the agency announced that 19 colleges in Davao City have applied for tuition fees and other fee hikes for the school year 2013-2014. Twenty-six Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have applied for increases for the entire region, four in Davao del Norte, two in Davao del Sur and one in Compostela Valley province. The figure, CHED director Raul
Alvarez announced in last Friday’s “Kapehan sa PIA” forum, is however, lower compared with last school year where 45 HEIs in the region, indicated they would increase tuition fees, 26 of these were schools in Davao City, eight in Davao del Sur, nine in
Davao del Norte, one in Compostela Valley and another one in Davao Oriental. Alvarez, however clarified that their agency merely admits applications for fee increases, but the schools in consultation with the students, alumni, faculty and nonteaching personnel are the ones who approve such hike proposals. Such consultations, Alvarez said, are mandatory.
Cherry Orendain, Southern Mindanao spokesperson of Anakbayan, a nationwide mass organization of Filipino youth, however pointed out that not once, in their experience, have such consultations prevented the increases in tuition fees. In fact, Orendain said, such consultations are usually “staged” to the effect that students are practically rendered powerless in the face of such exercise. Orendain said they are dismayed as CHED is supposed to be “a regulatory body to control school fees,” but the agency instead, “has become an instrument in the launching of such staged consultations for tuition hikes in campuses.” “The CHED is practically useless in terms of protecting students from high costs of education,” Orendain said. A first year student of the University of the Philippines –Mindanao for instance, pays P600 per unit, so if a student enrolls in 20 units of courses, he pays at least P16,000 pesos per semester, Orendain said. A Bachelor of Science in Elementary Education student of the University of Mindanao pays P394 per unit, so he pays P7,900 for 23 units, on top of the almost P7,000 cost of miscellaneous fees, she added. A student of Ateneo de Davao University pays P900 per unit, so 20 unit enrollment would entail a cost of P18,000 per semester, exclusive of miscellaneous fees (Davao Today).

St at e me n t of t h e P robl e m
This study aimed to determine the relationship between the tuition fee and academic performance of first year students of UM. To attain this, the study ought to answer the following questions: 1. What is the average per unit tuition fee during:
1.1 AY 2014-2015;
1.2 AY 2015-2016

2. Key Factors that affect academic performance of the students such as:
2.1 Financial difficulties;
2.2. Choosing a program;
2.3 Time Management;
2.4 Family

3. What are the tuition fee effects to the academic performance of first year students of the University of Mindanao ?

3.1 When increased;
3.2 When decrease;
4. Is there a significant relationship between Tuition Fee increase and the academic performance of the first year students of the University of Mindanao?

Significance of the Study
This Study would serve as the guide and awareness of the people to the current problem in terms of tuition fee increase. The following groups stand to benefit from the study:
Government Officials. The government officials will become aware of the reality in the negative effects of tuition increase to the academic performance of students. Thus, they may have a probable or effective solution to the existing problem.
University Administration. The University may have a view of how would it be to a student if tuition fee increase, its possible negative effects to academic life of a student in the university and how it truly harms a student.
Community. To the community specially those who earn just right who deserves information for things of their investment. This may be an informative tool for them to be prepared and be aware of the things to happen if tuition fee increase and how it greatly affects their investment in school.
The Researchers. To the researchers who is currently studying under the University of
Mindanao. This study may be the fulfillment of their queries about how tuition fee increase affects their life as a surviving student and it affects their future.

Theoretical Framework

Education is heavily subsidized around the world. These subsidies can affect both enrollment (extensive margin) and student effort (intensive margin).
Tuition fees can have an impact on student effort both through affecting incentives or by creating financial constraints. The latter is mainly relevant in a U.S. context where financial constraints can limit the possibility to continue studying and/or complete a study program. Studies on the effect of subsidies on student effort in this context therefore mainly focus on this element (Dynarski (2003, 2008), Scott-Clayton
(2011)).

Connections between financial aid amounts and measurements of success have been tested in the past. Peter Arcidiacono looked at how financial aid policies contribute to a student’s decision to matriculate with a given university and their future earnings. The study focuses on black students mostly and finds that although there is a significant effect of financial aid on graduating blacks from college, there is little effect on earnings from race-based additional aid beyond the standard amounts
(Arcidiacono, 2005).
Work study jobs, on the other hand, take away from effort in that they place time and attention requirements on students that take away from potential effort spent solely on academics. There may be some possible returns to ability depending on the job, but I choose to disregard this and hypothesize a negative link between work study aid and grade point average. In the literature on this subject, Stinebrickner et al. identifies several biases that can come up in doing research on the effects of work study on academic performance (2003).

Macro level enrolment data may also mask the changes in enrolment behavior that result from the implementation of, or increases in, tuition fees. These changes could be students switching from full to part-time programs, taking time off for a period of time to earn money, working longer hours in off-campus employment and/or changing from more to less expensive institutions or majors, or institutions closer to home. There is also evidence in the United States that in the face of rising tuition fees, more students may be participating in the College Board’s College Level Examination Programs that culminate in a test that if passed with a certain score allow the student to receive college credit from many public and private colleges and universities (Hebel 2003).

Coming Up
Conceptual Framework
Chapter 2

Review of Related Literature

Sakare Ayo
Nova Mae Corgio
Sheila May Cipriano
Gene Jon Villaber

Thank You!