DAVAO CITY – While parents and youth take the burden of expensive education, they are pressured further with increasing jobless rate. This was the lament of the youth group Anakbayan on the recent report of National Statistics Office, saying that unemployment rate in the Philippines has reached 7.1%in January, higher than the 6.8% registered in October 2012.
The group Also, Anakbayan scores the Aquino government for the increased number of underemployed from 7.018 million last year to 7.934 million in January.
Cherry Orendain, regional spokesperson of Anakbayan, said that the high unemployment rate and expensive education only pushes the Filipino youth to an uncertain living in the future.
According to Dr. Raul C. Alvarez Jr., acting director of the Commission on Higher Education in Region 11 in Mindanao, the number of higher education institutions that applied for tuition increase for the next school year now reached to 31.
In Davao City, 21 schools have applied for tuition increase, two in Davao del Sur province and five sought the same in areas badly hit by Typhoon Bopha (Pablo).
Moreover, CHED reported that the current average national tuition rate per unit is P475.47. Tuition rate in National Capital Region now reached P985.05, which translates to P20,000 to P40,000 per semester.
“With expensive education and high unemployment rate, the youth isn’t bothered sending themselves to schools anymore because they already know that they cannot finish due to their inability of paying the high tuition. If they could, there is still no assurance that they can get a sure job. Such a disappointing truth,” Orendain said in a statement to the Mindanao Examiner.
The NSO’s Labor Force Survey showed that the number of unemployed Filipinos went up to 2.894 million from 2.892 million a year ago. And 33.7% of which were high school graduates and 13.1% were college undergraduates, while 16.9% were college graduates.
“Noynoy Aquino’s boasted economic growth has become a cruel irony. Amidst the people’s demand for concrete solutions such as national industrialization to boost local employment and more budget for social services, especially on education, the Aquino administration depended on CCT, privatization of social services with Public-Private Partnership, and incessant budget cuts to education and other basic social services instead,” she said, referring to th Philippine president.
Orendain said: “Apparently, these young Filipinos who are supposedly nurtured by the society, are victims of state abandonment exacerbated by backward economic and policies. With all of Aquino’s inutility towards people’s grievances, the Filipino youth now has more reason to protest.”
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