MANILA – Students mostly from low- and middle-income families are protesting the Polytechnic University of the Philippines’ plan to raise tuition fees by 2,000 percent effective this coming school year 2010-2011.

Protests erupted yesterday and went on today at PUP’s main campus in Sta. Mesa, Manila. Irate students threw out chairs from the university’s buildings, staged a walkout from their classes and staged a protest march to the presidential palace nearby.

PUP officials are planning to raise tuition from the current P12.00 ($0.26) to P200.00 ($4.39) per unit, said Donna Pascual, the student representative in the university’s governing Board of Regents. The low tuition fees have earned the PUP the monicker “people’s university”.  Only a small fraction of the students receive a full academic scholarship to include living and other educational expenses.  (The country’s daily minimum wage ranges from P210.00 [$4.60] in portions of Mindanao to P382.00 [$8.38].) 

Pascual said while the board has yet to act on the proposal, the PUP administration has issued a notice on the university website, informing incoming freshmen that there will be a tuition fee increase that will affect them.

The notice reads: “ADVISORY: The public is being informed that PUP will increase the tuition and other fees of incoming freshmen in board and laboratory-intensive programs for the school year 2010-2011, subject to the approval of the University Board of Regents.”

Pascual said the tuition fee hike may be the PUP administration’s response to a cut in the national government’s budget for the university.

She said that in the 2010 national appropriations act, the Arroyo government, with consent from Congress, reduced the budget for PUP by P43-million ($943,720) to P661-million ($14-million).

Around 52,000 students and 1,483 faculty would be sharing this amount for university-level education across PUP’s six campuses, two branches and 10 extensions across the country.

PUP’s huge student population, many of whom come from the country’s peasant, workingclass and middle-class families, is a hotbed of student activism. The Arroyo administration should stop the PUP administration’s surprise attack on the issue of tuition fees or face the wrath of these students and their families.

The University of the Philippines, another state university, raised its tuition fees by more than 300-percent in December 2006. From P300.00 ($6.58) per unit, the tuition went up to P1,000.00 ($21.94) per unit.

View some photos of PUP student protests here.