Parents accompany students as classes open for the new school year at an elementary school in Manila on June 16, 2025.
AFP/Jam Sta Rosa
Each time floodwaters rise in our cities, so does public outrage. Every deluge brings renewed scrutiny of the Department of Public Works and Highways and its flood control projects, many of them overpriced, substandard, or unfinished, according to the Commission on Audit.
Corruption in public works is often framed as an engineering problem or a law enforcement failure. But what if its roots lie elsewhere, inside the very sector that is supposed to safeguard the country’s future: education?
The uncomfortable truth is that educators help make corruption possible. Not by stealing funds, but by allowing their labor to be chronically undervalued.
By accepting unpaid intellectual work as “service to the nation,” by enduring underfunded research cultures and endless paperwork that goes unrewarded, teachers and professors quietly enable the state to divert funds to other sectors where they are more easily plundered.
At first glance, education seems to be a budgetary priority. For fiscal year 2025, the sector received over one trillion pesos, the largest allocation among government departments.
For 2026, the proposed education budget rises further, roughly 16% higher, covering the Department of Education at 928.52 billion pesos, State Universities and Colleges at 134.99 billion, the Commission on Higher Education at 34 billion, and TESDA at 20.24 billion. The Department of Budget and Management even proudly announced that this marks the first time the Philippines is set to meet UNESCO’s recommended four percent of GDP education spending.
Yet much of this headline budget never reaches classrooms or research labs. Funds meant to nourish the intellectual core of education remain idle, are subjected to cost-cutting, or are clawed back as “savings,” shrinking the real budget that educators can access.
Across higher education, underutilization is chronic. A Congressional Policy and Budget Research Department analysis found that CHED’s obligation rate fell to just 82 percent in 2022, leaving 6.6 billion pesos unused.
Utilization was especially low for grants meant for faculty and postgraduate students, with obligation rates plunging to below 50%. Even the Higher Education Development Fund posted a low disbursement rate. These are precisely the programs meant to support research and scholarly growth, yet they are starved by bureaucratic bottlenecks and cautious disbursement rules.
Basic education mirrors the pattern. The Commission on Audit flagged the Department of Education for over 12 billion pesos in disallowances and suspensions from its 2023 budget, money frozen or returned to the Treasury instead of strengthening teacher training or classroom instruction.
Meanwhile, the department’s computerization program lost 10 billion pesos in late 2024 budget cuts, further stalling digital learning capacity. These reversions appear as “savings” in balance sheets, but in reality they are lost opportunities to invest in teachers and learners.
Such practices are celebrated as fiscal discipline, but to educators, they translate to emptier research funds, stricter grant pipelines, and heavier workloads with fewer resources. They breed a culture where scholarship is seen as optional and where public money shifts to sectors with higher leakage, like infrastructure.
While budgets shrink in practice, the demands on educators balloon. Faculty are expected to mentor colleagues, conduct workshops, serve as speakers in national training sessions, sit in committees, review theses, and handle mountains of paperwork, usually without overtime pay or even honoraria.
Research is pursued on shoe-string budgets, and publications are completed without compensation, justified as contributions to the field. Even hours spent crafting accreditation documents and curriculum reports are invisible in salary computations.
Compounding this is a deeply restrictive ranking system. Under the old National Budget Circular 461, State Universities and Colleges were only allowed to designate 20% of their faculty plantilla as full professors. This policy was designed to control salary costs but became a hard ceiling that left many qualified educators stuck in lower ranks.
Today, under the new DBM–CHED Joint Circular system rolled out starting 2021, that quota has been formally removed. However, its effects linger because many institutions still have very few professor items since DBM only authorizes a limited number of high-rank plantilla positions within each university’s budget.
As a result, even highly qualified faculty remain stuck in lower ranks not for lack of merit but for lack of available positions.
This matters because teacher education is not like other fields. In business or engineering, practitioners can teach while staying in industry. But in teacher education, the “teachers of teachers” must be deeply immersed in scholarship to stay abreast of evolving theories, pedagogies, and policies.
Limiting the number of professors while overloading everyone else ensures that the system runs on overworked, underpaid labor. And as long as this silent exploitation continues, policymakers can justify diverting budget increases to non-teaching costs or to entirely different departments.
Every peso not claimed for research, mentoring, or academic work becomes available for flood control contracts and the kickbacks that follow.
The result is a stagnant research culture. The Philippines spends just 0.2 to 0.32% of GDP on research and development, far below the one percent UNESCO benchmark and the ASEAN average.
This chronic under-investment has been flagged repeatedly by the World Bank and the Philippine Development Plan, yet it persists even as national budgets swell. Because grants are so scarce and difficult to access, many educators choose not to apply at all.
Others spend months writing proposals that never get funded, consuming time they could have spent mentoring students or publishing studies. Over time, fewer scholars critique policies or conduct independent evaluations. Fewer studies are done on budget misuse. This weakens the oversight capacity of the education sector, making it easier for other departments to spend and overspend without informed resistance from civil society.
Meanwhile, preliminary fraud audits have found hundreds of millions of pesos worth of DPWH flood control projects in Bulacan that were substandard or non-existent, illustrating how corruption flourishes where scrutiny is weakest. It is no coincidence that the most corruptible sectors are often those untouched by strong academic oversight.
To end this cycle, educators must stop accepting invisibility as part of the job. Mentoring, research, committee service, paperwork and public speaking must be formally counted as workload and compensated accordingly.
CHED and SUCs must simplify and accelerate research grant pipelines, with clear timelines and automatic reprogramming if funds are not disbursed within the fiscal year. DBM and CHED must ensure the new system actually expands professorial items, especially in teacher education where scholarship is essential.
Portions of budgets should be ring-fenced for research infrastructure, mentoring programs and publishing. State universities should be required to publicly post monthly research fund utilization rates to ensure money does not lapse or revert as “savings.” Faculty unions and associations must campaign not just for salaries but for recognition of invisible intellectual labor and push back against tokenizing service as an excuse for unpaid work.
We like to boast that education takes the biggest slice of the national budget. But as long as educators remain underpaid, overburdened and under-supported, that budget is an illusion. Savings that come from starving research and overworking faculty do not make government efficient, they make corruption easier.
If we want to stop scandals in public works, we must first stop enabling them through neglect of our own sector. Every grant delayed, every professorial line left unfilled, every research fund clawed back as savings makes it easier for public money to flow where scrutiny is weakest. Education must not only be the biggest budget, it must be the highest priority. And it begins when educators stop being silent accomplices.
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Levi E. Elipane (elipane.le@pnu.edu.ph) is an associate professor and deputy dean of the College of Advanced Studies (CAS); Allen A. Espinosa (espinosa.aa@pnu.edu.ph) and Arlyne C. Marasigan (marasigan.ac@pnu.edu.ph) are professors in CAS and fellows at the Educational Policy Research and Development Office; and Leah Amor S. Cortez (cortez.las@pnu.edu.ph) is an associate professor at the Faculty of Science, Technology, and Mathematics and executive director and provost of the Philippine Normal University South Luzon. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Philippine Normal University.