Entrance Exams: Entrance to what? To my right?

ARTICLE: CHRIS BURNET RAMOS | FEBRUARY 24, 2023

In the current world of non-living wages and costly commodity prices, quality education has mostly never been a human right—it has always been just an opportunity. A privilege vested not only for those who can pay field trip fees or purchase extravagant school materials but also for those who are ‘brilliant’ enough to rightfully answer a couple of sheets of paper that will technically define the rest of their lives.

And, guess how this ‘brilliance’ can be measured? By a numerical score sharpened by paid review centers, capability to purchase scientific books, access to internet, and any other form of entitlement that only a chunk of the higher education sector enjoys.

On January 28, the Polytechnic University of the Philippines Collegiate Entrance Test (PUPCET), the qualifying exam of the country's largest university by population, returned after three years of online qualifying assessment, catering to more than 20,000 examinees on its first batch. This was months after the University of the Philippines College Admission Test (UPCAT) also returned in June 2023.

No matter how upstanding passing these exams would be, such honor cannot hide how there should've been no entrance examinations to state universities in the first place. It is insulting to watch the fruit of our taxes be a foundation of our social services by passing through trials and tribulations first.

Covering the PUPCET, for instance, made me encounter Jhon Von Alzate, a 17-year-old examinee from Eastern Samar, who commuted for 24 hours just to take the highly anticipated exam in Manila. Living with financial constraints, his fares were funded by his co-examinees whom he met online. When asked why he would travel that far just to take the exam, he said opportunities were better in PUP—free tuition, no fee for entrance exams, so why not?

Little did he know that a neoliberal arthropod only camouflages in the face of academic resilience and ‘top-employed’ title of the campus.

The senate even approved a law called the Free College Entrance Examinations Bill last December where students will be let off the hook from paying examination fees in private universities only if they belong to 10% of the graduating class and to the poverty threshold defined by the government itself.

What's the point of making these examinations free if thousands of students are still deprived of resources that make their academic abilities fit in the format of entrance exams?

Universities carve their logos behind the names of ‘qualified’ students. And when they say ‘qualified,’ it means someone who had the opportunity to work their standards years before putting their feet on the university grounds.

It is awful. Thousands should be lying back in their preferred programs and dream schools, living their most comfortable college moments, if it's not just for an exclusive academic foyer—when, in fact, graduating in high school should have paved the way for an automatic elevation to the next level of education. A factory of diplomas kept us within the bounds of stagnant progress, or at least, for some, a forced development.

A study even shows an ‘income advantage’ in the admission system of the University of the Philippines, where applicants from higher-income households had a higher likelihood of being admitted to the prestigious uni, especially in their first-choice courses.

That makes entrance examinations in the country superficial, unjust scams to the Filipino youth. It aims to filter renowned-to-be students but universities are sifting most of its learners from privileged families face-to-face.

Headed by a populist leader, Filipino children are now studying under the country's basic education system, which is clearly smoked with crises. As they grow up, we should not let them reach higher education with a wall that will hamper the marks they have made.

In college, they should, at least, feel their right to education by penetrating its final stops free of doubts that they might not pass an entrance exam or that they do not have the means to do so. Just like other human rights, education should have no qualification to be accessed. An entrance exam is only an entrance to the rotten system, not to the quality, accessible education that every child must possess.