Most tuition hike applications below 10 percent -- DepEd

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InterAksyon.com
The online news portal of TV5

MANILA -- The Department of Education (DepEd) will be approving most of the applications for tuition increase of private elementary and high schools nationwide but clarified that most of these hikes will only be minimal.

Education Secretary Armin Luistro, in a briefing, said only about eight percent of the thousands of private basic education schools in the country have applied for a tuition fee hike of not more than 10 percent of their current rate.

“Many of them have kept within the five percent increase and 10 percent at the most. If you'll notice, the inflation rate over the past years have been minimal and we’re very happy that the schools have kept within that,” he said.

Inflation rate in the recent years have been within the government’s target band of three to five percent.

Luistro is not worried about the influx of transferees from private schools to public schools as a result of tuition increases citing that education officials have not seen “very significant movement or transferees from private schools to public schools.”

“What we have seen though is that there are pockets of those mass transfers. But this does not seem to be related to the tuition increase. Many of these pockets of mass transfers are because the private schools have closed from their area,” he explained.

He explained that school officials will have second thoughts asking for a tuition increase of more than 20 percent because their applications will definitely be thumbed down.

He disclosed that about 70 percent of the tuition hike will be used for teachers’ salaries, which he pointed out is “fair enough” otherwise private schools will lose their skilled teaching personnel.

He also discourages tuition fee hike moratorium pointing out that at the end of the moratorium period school owners will be asking for higher increases, which definitely would be to the detriment of the parents.

“If it’s (tuition hike) within five percent, I think it’s manageable,” he stressed. 

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