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She had applied for a student loan but was turned down. Then her efforts to seek an extension of the deadline for her tuition payment came to naught. And so she was forced to take a leave of absence (LOA) since last month for her inability to pay her tuition.
These things were apparently too much for Kristel Tejada to take—and so she took her own life yesterday by drinking a can of silver cleaner.
Tejada, 16, was a freshman Behavioural Studies student at the University of the Philippines (UP), in Manila, whose suicide has been making the rounds of social media and earned criticisms of the country’s premier university’s socialised tuition scheme.
“This is so sad,” says Desiree Carlos, formerly a desk editor at the national daily Malaya and an alumna of UP-Diliman, on her Facebook shout-out on Friday.
Under UP’s Socialised Tuition and Financial Assistance Program (STFAP), Tejada was placed in ‘Bracket B’, which means that she had to pay 1,000 pesos (Dh90.64) per unit of tuition. STFAP categorises students into brackets based on their family’s capacity to pay tuition fees.
In the Philippine educational system, one subject normally is composed of three units. An undergraduate student usually has a full-load of 21 units per semester, which runs for about five months. There are two semesters that regular students have to attend per school-year, and there is a summer interval of six weeks where students may also enrol in classes if they want to. Other schools, such as the elite De La Salle University, follow the trimester programme.
Some people were asking why was Tejada placed under ‘Bracket B’ when her father is a taxi driver and her mother is a plain housewife. Others were feeling sad the case mirrors the plight of so many intellectually deserving but poor students.
The UP educational system is known for its intellectual elitism, with the flagship Diliman campus accepting only one or two in every 10 applicants per school-year. The state university used to extend free tuition to all students, regardless of social status, but in recent years adopted the STFAP scheme as government significantly trimmed education subsidies.
Tejada reportedly posted the shout-out “I hope, I will be missed” on her Facebook page before she drank the silver cleaner. Her parents discovered what she did at their home in Manila’s Tondo district at 3am on Friday, and rushed her to the Metropolitan Medical Centre, but it was too late to save her life.
Professor Anderea Bautista Martinez, of the Department of Behavioural Sciences at UP-Manila, was quoted by the university’s student publication, The Manila Collegian, as saying that the victim frequented the Office of Student Services to seek counselling for her school problems.
“The LOA had a great impact on her because even her family was affected,” Martinez said. “She had not been attending the class since February. She frequently texted to tell me she could no longer bear her problem.”
Tejada is survived by her parents and her four other siblings. She was the eldest, and had felt the pressure for her to do well in school and be successful later on in life, so that she could send her other siblings to university.
Lawyer Terry Ridon, of the Kabataan (Youth) party-list, a political group having a representative at the Lower House (of Congress), was quoted in InterAskyon, TV5’s online news portal, as blaming the “commercialisation of education and the overall bankruptcy of the government’s economic policies” for the suicide of Tejada.
He also lashed out at UP Manila for placing Tejada in ‘Bracket B’ of the socialised tuition scheme when her parents could not afford to pay such.
“These policies are realities, now more than ever we must recognise them,” Ridon said. “The lives of the youth are too precious to be endangered by ensuring payments, deadlines, and their consequences. Commercialisation is prioritising profit over learning.”
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