Angara tells SUCs to raise funds to fill in budget gaps

State Colleges and Universities (SUC) should think of ways to raise funds to fill in the gaps left by the cuts on their budget, Senator Edgardo Angara said on Monday. During Monday's budget hearing of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), Angara cited as an example the SUCs in Region VI which supposedly raised some P937 million in 2009 through research and development projects. "Perhaps you can learn some lessons from the experience of Region VI. (There is) no sense calling (yourselves state) universities if (you are) without research and development," said the senator, who heads the Senate committee on education. Region VI, also known as Western Visayas, consists of 16 cities and six provinces: Aklan, Antique, Negros Occidental, Capiz, Guimaras, and Iloilo. Angara likewise told SUCs to accept the fact that their budgets are bound to get smaller every year, given the increasing number of SUCs in the country and the small budget allocation for them. "The (share of the) pie you get will get smaller and smaller," he said. CHED chair Patricia Licuanan, meanwhile, said that they are aware of this because only P1.7 billion of their proposed P2.5-billion budget was approved. "We will work with what we've got. I think we just have to accept that this is a tight period, a period for austerity," she told reporters after the hearing. She likewise agreed with Angara's suggestion that SUCs should raise their own funds for additional budget. "Over the long term they really have opportunities to earn extra income," she said, adding that they can earn through their lands, other assets, and research capability. "We will try to be creative. CHED will look into its own resources," she added. Licuanan noted, however, that this does not mean that education is not a priority of the Aquino government. "That's not entirely true, (the) basic education budget was raised. Rightly so. Essentially the government funds are limited and so they choose to do the urgent thing of basic education first," she said. - VVP, GMANews.TV