MANILA – A lawmaker on Wednesday questioned the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) regarding “high” dropout rates despite the free tuition law, saying this should not be the case.

Northern Samar First District Rep. Paul Daza said the Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education Act, signed into law last 2017 covers subsidies to students studying in state universities and colleges, local universities and colleges, and state-run technical-vocational institutions

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Rep. Janette Garin, the budget sponsor for CHEd, said the attrition rate in recent years averaged 37.86 percent between 2018 and 2022.

This went slightly down, however, to 29.39 percent between 2020 and 2024 based on CHEd’s figures.

But Daza described the figures as still high.

“I don’t think that's a good performance despite the free tuition law and I think we all have shared responsibility in trying to address that issue to increase enrollment but attrition rates [are] still quite high,” said Daza

“We put enough budget to tertiary education scholarship or whatever it is. We can reduce attrition rate and increase graduation rates,” he added.

Garin said the first reason for dropout is financial difficulties. Despite this though, the country’s graduation rate remained high, citing data from UNESCO published June this year.  

“While the graduation rate [is] 56.88 percent for the Philippines. We are a little bit higher than the Republic of Korea which is 55.46 percent. But we are much much higher than Canada which is at 42.7 percent,” said Garin.  

She said CHEd’s goal at the end of the day is to achieve zero college dropout but there are some circumstances out of their control.

“We agree that the outcome indicator for higher education is actually completion rate. We do aspire to achieve 99 to 100 percent but it is something that cannot be achieved as of the current times,” she said.

Daza urged CHEd to instead consider focusing on the accomplishment figures in the Tulong Dunong Program and Universal access to quality tertiary education or tertiary education subsidy and include these to the key performance indicators. 

“So it will not force CHEd, state universities, to always look at it every year with a push to lower dropout rates and to increase graduation rates,” he said. 

Garin said the CHEd and the University of the Philippines agreed with the lawmaker’s proposal.