Not even the government’s tightened purse strings can deter UP from proposing what could be the university’s highest annual budget in history.
For 2022, UP has proposed a staggering P36.5-billion budget. This is its first budget proposal crafted during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is not the highest budget that UP has ever pitched, though this spending package, if approved, would nearly double the university’s current budget.
I have covered the UP budget for the Collegian for two cycles already and, for this year, not much has really changed—the programs lined up for 2022 are largely construction projects that seek to continue the university administration’s push for a vast expansion of infrastructure across the entire UP System. And as we enter yet another year of the pandemic, it remains business as usual for the university.
As in previous years, the approval of this ambitious plan remains up in the air. This is especially true in light of the pandemic, as the national government cites increased debt, lower revenues, and slower economic recovery as reasons for the country’s tight fiscal space.
In fact, for 2022, the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) has imposed a budget ceiling of P20.7 billion for UP, down P800 million from this year’s current appropriations. For comparison, the nation’s second largest public university system, the Mindanao State University, has a spending cap of P3.5 billion—P1.7 billion less than their 2021 budget. If only the DBM would have its way, most public universities would be on the chopping block in 2022.
In UP, funding under infrastructure or capital outlays (CO) gets the highest boost. Under the plan, CO would be around six times higher than this year’s current budget; a total of P11.5 billion would be spent on various projects across the UP System.
This has been a trend, anyway. In the 2020 proposal, the proposed CO allotment was nearly a quarter of the budget, while for next year’s budget it could be a third. And all this big infrastructure push by the university administration is, ultimately, designed to implement the UP Master Development Plan (MDP) which, at its core, designates UP’s lands for resource and income generation in the guise of so-called land and asset development.
Especially in the context of the pandemic, the steady implementation of the MDP is a death knell for the UP community. For the jeepney drivers, the MDP might restrict their routes, limiting the areas where they can operate. For some manininda, this means their relocation to a common food park in E. Jacinto. Worse, for campus residents, the MDP could mean the destruction of their homes and livelihoods.
Apart from its dubious infrastructure push, the proposed budget nonetheless attempts to deliver on some of the UP community’s long-sought demands. At least P2.2 billion is currently requested from the national government to create 2,007 new permanent positions, which, if approved, might pave the way for the university to regularize more of its contractual workers. The inclusion of this proposal into UP’s 2022 budget is a decisive win for the decades-long campaign of workers and unions for security of tenure—a testament to their efforts in negotiating and mobilizing.
In seeking to regularize its workers and improve campus infrastructure—which has long been deteriorating due to decades of state neglect—the university attempts to fulfill the demands the UP community has long campaigned for. These priorities are timely just as workers grapple with job insecurity and better facilities are needed to comply with pandemic protocols.
These are welcome developments. But, at the same time, the university must not also forget to address the urgent situation its constituents are in. In a dialogue with student leaders, the university administration stated that its 600-page comprehensive plan and roadmap for the safe reopening of schools is “ready for implementation” once the national government gives its approval. Vice President for Planning and Finance Lisa Grace Bersales told me that the gradual reopening of classes will be funded by a P100-million item included in UP’s 2021 budget.
However, with the threat of the more virulent Delta variant, this plan might be delayed anew. With the government relying on an alphabet soup of lockdowns and a snail-paced vaccination drive, COVID-19 variants will, inevitably, keep on emerging. That the threat of a more virulent coronavirus evaded UP’s planning is simply unfortunate.
The university should have planned better. The situation we have this year, unlike in 2020, is no longer unforeseen. In the past, unexpected expenses were funded by reprogramming UP’s own revenues from rentals, sales, and other business ventures, or its savings from previous years. Just last year, this was done when the UP Board of Regents (BOR) gave President Danilo Concepcion blanket approval to seek funds for gadget grants and internet packages.
Currently, aside from donations and savings, refunds from the Commission on Higher Education for the students’ tuition and miscellaneous fees are being used to give remote learning and teaching assistance, Bersales told me. But this refund is not a request; it is mandated by law as part of the Free Tuition Policy.
By failing to ask for funding for these urgent programs, UP would be forced to use its own money. But these internally generated funds are not big. This year, they comprise just eight percent or P1.8 billion of the university’s operating budget. This amount is even P500 million less than last year’s.
Before the pandemic, the use of these funds was typically used to fund the salaries of non-UP contractuals. But in September 2020, the BOR approved to use previous years’ unexpended balance worth P70 million to augment various campuses’ funds for maintenance and other operating expenses (MOOE) which were eventually used for COVID-19 preparations. Indeed, without the government’s support, most state universities, not just UP, are forced to seek funds—largely from their relatively scant earnings—to implement their pandemic response.
The budget proposal, however, is not the end for our demands. Though Malacañang has yet to submit the president’s proposal on Monday, the Congressional deliberations on the budget could be the next forum where we could assert and amplify our campaigns. We have proven the success of lobbying lawmakers for our demands as recent as 2019, when UP was able to stave off an impending P1.6-billion budget cut.
The UP budget proposal is a potent policy tool that has been used by all UP presidents to advance their priorities and own agenda. The UP budget affects the way of life of all UP sectors. It is simply too important to be left at the hands of the bureaucrats in Quezon Hall.
The fate of the entire UP System, at least fiscally speaking, should not be decided by the table battles in a boardroom. Students, in particular, should assert a more active role in the crafting of our budget framework. After all, it has been a frequent practice in the past for student leaders to organize forums to discuss the budget. There is no reason why we should not do them again.
We have representatives on the BOR, and they should lead the charge in scrutinizing and offering alternatives to the administration’s plans. It is in this close scrutiny of the UP budget proposal that we can effectively build on our demands and counter-proposals within and beyond the budget deliberations from UP to Congress. The budget increase for UP for the past five consecutive years must not deter us from probing both the UP administration and the national government.
Alongside our clamor for higher state subsidy in education, remote learning aid, and ligtas na balik eskwela, it remains an important political task to hold university administrators accountable for what they include, or fail to include, in UP’s annual budget proposal. The UP administration uses the budget to forward their agenda, but with our collective efforts, we can do so, too. ●
