You don’t have to live in the Philippines, or correspond with anyone from the Philippines for very long before the subject of schools and tuition comes up.  As ‘the foreigner’ in the family it’s very common to be asked to help with sending someone to school … and it’s usually a good thing if you keep your wits about you and make some intelligent choices.  In fact, if you get in on this process near the beginning, you might even teach some members of the family a little bit about making wise consumer choices and checking out facts rather than hype …an issues, sad to say … that afflicts the Philippines badly, even the most educated and cosmopolitan of the population.

First of all, you need to recognize something here … before you get yourself upset and get yourself into a family feud type situation.  It is a long and time honor4ed tradition for families to get together and help one or two students at a time through school.  Those students who have been helped will then be expected to help younger ones coming along behind, and in general, this practice works very well.  It has been going on in many families for years, centuries even, and you aren’t being brought into this because you are seen as a walking ATM machine.  You can, and should, make wise decisions about your money, but a tip learned the hard way … if you start out with the attitude that this is about people’s hands in your pocket … even making jokes about it …you may find the whole process a lot more expensive than the money involved.  Step one is, maintain your cool and keep your comments and doubts to yourself. 

Second, ask and also listen to family stories from the past.  Has the family been doing this for some time?  Do they have a tack record of success.  In my family, for example, one of the sisters-in-law is a very successful Intensive Care Unit nurse, who has been working in the US more than 10 years now.  She has helped others behind her in the family through nursing school and is helping another to this day.  Another sister-in-law has several college grad children out in the job world and a high school age daughter.  The younger girl has an endowment-type plan (very common here in the Philippines, I’ll write more on that later) which will pay a substantial amount towards her college tuition when she graduates high school.  The older children are also already committed to contributing to their little sister.  Nothing can guarantee that problems won’t happen, but anyone in business or personnel management will tell you that the most reliable indicator of future performance is past successes … so I’d have no problem making a small contribution into a family with a history like this one.  Find out about your particular family’s success or failure stories before you make decisions.

I can already see that this is turning into a long post … so much that could be covered here … so I will save some things for future subjects and leave you with the first nugget of truth here.

Third thing to look into.  There are a number of opportunistic or perhaps even sham schools in the Philippines.  Because of a complete lack of responsibility in advertising laws it’s very easy to set up a ‘paper’ school.  This has been a huge problem, especially in the nursing field.  How would you, as an outsider, possibly know one school from another?  The immediate answer is, it’s not easy …but here’s the first place I would focus.  What if you could find an online list off all institutions of higher learning complete with the courses they have submitted for government accreditation.  The school’s official name, address, phone and email, years in business, etc.?   You are in luck.  Go to the Philippine Commission on Higher education (CHED) website and you’ll find current year lists, divided by region.  The fact that a school is listed here isn’t a guarantee of quality, but it is surely a very important step in the right direction … an dif someone asked me for help to a school which is not listed?  You can bet a very large red flag would go up.  There are far too many decent schools with good track records here to take a chance with unlisted school … or so Philly opines.

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