By Jan Vicente B. Pekas
Towards the end of the previous year, as I was still enjoying the last specks of vacation, I was seated in the jeepney headed towards Guisad. Like always, the jeepney before it is full of passengers is filled with mostly sounds of conversations. Even if I didn’t mean to chime in, the conversations between the two high-schoolers seated beside me was loud enough for me to hear. Their talk, I suspect, is one of the many topics of other high-school students about to enter College. In their stories, one of them said their intention of not going ahead with college just yet but instead finding work instead. Included also was their justifiable complaints of the tuition fees of the various universities in Baguio and the long distance of Benguet State University.
The issue does not entirely lie within high school students but also many college students who have often made the hard decision of stopping their education in order to earn more money. In universities, when you talk with others, the same topic pop up again and again. Even if you take a semester off in college, then that is all but a guarantee of a delay in graduation, further increasing the worries and troubles of students.
Many students, especially those not coming from wealthy or corrupt families face challenges not only in the form of academic hurdles but financial and several other issues. In this state, you cannot just expect all of them to excel in a field they cannot even put their entire focus on. Constantly worrying where to find the money to pay the tuition fees regularly does not provide the proper set up for learning.
Reading several pages of philosophy for a recitation in the coming days while worrying about other things only leads to a blank head when the time comes for answering the tough questions of the professor. Yet even with all these considerations, you can’t rely on the professor to even be a bit understanding of each of their 40 plus students.
For the many students, they are truly left on their own, with the system not on their side, yet saddled with the pressure to excel and pull their families out of their current state. If the hope of a nation is only treated like this then optimism for the future is all but futile. It was already said by a great man in the past how important the youth is to the nation, yet after all these years the hope is not yet truly nurtured or given the proper attention. To transform our hopes into reality, then the same hope must be properly nourished, but it seems not all people want that hope and remain satisfied with the status quo. **
