Only a fifth of UP College Admissions (UPCA) 2023 qualifiers are from public general schools, despite comprising a majority of Philippine high schools, revealing that better-funded schools possess a significant advantage in UP's admissions process.

Instead, qualifiers come primarily from private and science high schools—institutions with generally better access to funding—with a concentration in the National Capital Region (NCR), despite UP’s mandate to provide disadvantaged students with democratic access to its academic programs. 

Data was obtained for UPCAT 2020 and UPCA 2021–2023 from the UP Office of Admissions (OAdms). Public schools are classified under science high, UP-administered, state universities and colleges (SUC), barrio, vocational, Philippine schools abroad, and general, which includes all other public schools.

Excellence

In 2023, public general, barrio, vocational, community, and PSO schools composed only 20.7 percent of all passers (see sidebar 1), concentrated in Luzon, where a majority of public schools are located. This, despite public schools comprising 58.9 percent of all senior high schools (SHS) as of 2020, with only around a hundred classified as science high schools as of 2017. 

However, this was not the case before, as public general high schools composed a majority of public school passers in 2021. But in 2022, qualifiers from public general schools dropped by 4.4 percentage points while those from science high schools increased by 3.6 percentage points. 

Science high schools have since regained their position as the public school with the largest portion of passers in 2023. The biggest share of science high school passers come from NCR, with 10.1 percent of all qualifiers.

“What private and science high schools have that other schools don’t are the resources that these institutions can provide their students to better learn and explore ideas,” said Jewel Politico, the UP Diliman University Student Council education and research councilor, emphasizing that this kind of edge proves advantageous in college entrance exams.

Most private school passers also come from NCR, and in fact, NCR-based private schools alone took the biggest portion of qualifiers in 2023, with 28.9 percent—more than double the next largest, which is from non-NCR Luzon private schools.

Though there have been shifts in the demographics of qualifiers in the three years of UPCA, 2023 had the most similar make-up as UPCAT 2020. Without the exam, UPCA based applicants’ University Predicted Grade (UPG)—the metric to determine UP qualifiers—on their standardized high school grades.

These grades were then subjected to an admissions model, which was based on a trend of previous UPCAT qualifiers’ high school grades and their subsequent academic performance in UP. 

“Although UP has figured out a solution for [the unstandardized grades], we still can’t ignore the fact that the current solution has been particularly favorable for NCR private high schools,” said Politico.

Access

The UPCAT test is in English and Filipino, divided into language proficiency, reading comprehension, science, and mathematics subtests. The UPCAT score is combined with high school grades to get an applicant’s UPG.

With the UPCAT heavily reliant on proficiency in these areas, students with better access to facilities and resources are expected to have an advantage. But issues like undersupplied textbooks and unresolved building damages persist, furthering barriers posed to public schools.  

Disparities in academic performance among different schools were seen in the 2018 Programme for  International Student Assessment, where private schools had higher scores than public schools in reading, scientific, and mathematical literacy. 

A number of public junior high school students may have also transferred to private schools as 2,434 public high schools do not offer senior high as of 2020. Some also benefit from the SHS Voucher Program, with 1.1 million grantees in school year 2023–2024.

However, public schools offering senior high are only expected to decrease following the Commission on Higher Education’s order for SUCs and local colleges and universities to discontinue their SHS programs this year.

Though the 2024 education budget has increased overall, it still falls short of the budget demanded by the Alliance of Concerned Teachers, where they asked for higher allocations for basic education facilities and teacher salaries.

And with insufficient funding in key areas of education, limitations to qualifying for UP are likely to persist.

“We shouldn’t actually frown upon private and science high schools for being able to produce a huge number of UP qualifiers annually. Instead, we should be frowning upon how inadequate our education system is to not be able to provide the same caliber of teaching across all schools in the country,” said Politico.

Equity

UP administers an Excellence and Equity Admission System (EEAS) in compliance with its mandate to provide democratic access. Under this, 70 percent of qualifiers are from those with the highest passing UPG and 30 percent are chosen with adjustments for economic and geographic factors.

However, UP’s affirmative action may be insufficient given the composition of qualifiers. “It’s as if the EEAS misses the part in which it’s supposed to maintain a student population that comes from diverse cultures and backgrounds based on their geographic distribution,” said Politico.

But even during the application stage itself, a barrier could already exist, as single-digit applicants from certain areas come from high income brackets, said Admissions Director Francisco de los Reyes in the 2023 Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas-UP Professorial Chair Lectures on December 14, 2023. 

Some areas with low applicants also have high passing rates, which could indicate that some schools let only their top students apply to achieve a better qualifying rate, de los Reyes added. After all, some documents for the UPCA and UPCAT application must be secured from the school.

This case can be seen in Mindanao with its overall 30.4-percent passing rate while constituting only 5.2 percent of applicants in 2023 (see sidebar 2). While this passing rate has increased compared to UPCAT 2020, the number of applicants, nonetheless, remained relatively the same despite an increase for NCR, Luzon, and Visayas.