Billions in funding cuts restored: SUCs to get higher budget in 2024

MANILA, Philippines — State universities and colleges (SUCs) were granted a P21 billion increase in their overall budgets for 2024, according to publicly available budget documents, handing out a win to the widespread pushback against the government’s earlier plan to cut billions from state-run schools’ funding.

SUCs will get around a total of P128 billion next year, according to the 2024 General Appropriations Act (GAA), higher than the P107 billion it received in 2023 and the P100 billion originally allocated for SUCs in the proposed spending plan for 2024.

This comes after a wave of protests led by educators and their students, as well as a signature campaign involving at least 36 SUC presidents, that sought to restore P6 billion in budget cuts believed to mostly impact public universities' capacity to improve facilities and equipment.

According to 2024 budget documents uploaded on the website of the Department of Budget and Management, Congress bumped SUCs’ budgets up by about P27 billion — 27% higher than their original allocation in the 2024 National Expenditure Program (NEP).

Philstar.com's computation of the 2024 budget allocations found that lawmakers restored the budget cuts for all of the 26 SUCs that had significant slashes to their funding in the 2024 NEP. 

However, at least 15 out of 26 schools received allocations lower than the funding they received in 2023, with two public universities set to get just under half of the current year’s budget.

The budget of Mariano Marcos State University in Ilocos Norte was halved from P2.5 billion to P1 billion in 2024, according to the GAA, while funding for the Eastern Visayas State University in Leyte decreased from P2.2 billion to P874 million.

The universities that received the largest increases to their budget in 2024 were Cebu Normal University (268%) and Mindanao State University (94%). 

Mindanao State University — which recently experienced a security breach on its Marawi City campus when alleged terrorist groups bombed its gymnasium — will get P12.4 billion in next year’s budget, up from P6.4 billion in 2023.

Aside from MSU and Cebu Normal University, the university benefited the most from