UP Professors Earn Less Than PMA Cadets?

[chua_riwap]

UP Professors Earn Less Than PMA Cadets


Inquirer
12/29/2006

CADETS at the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) may not know it, but they are actually earning more than some teachers at what is considered the country’s premier educational institution, the University of the Philippines system.

While a PMA cadet gets P16,338 every month, including subsistence allowance, an assistant professor I at the state-run university, with salary grade 18, has a monthly salary of P15,841.

“At standardized salary rates, the UP faculty is resigned to a life of genteel poverty,” Roland Simbulan, faculty regent, said at the recent UP System-wide Academic Personnel Conference in the Diliman, Quezon City campus. “If a faculty member is an instructor or assistant professor, it means that he/she gets less than what a student earns in a call center,” he added.

The UP has a faculty of 3,600 educators in all its campuses. Simbulan said that while faculty members were proud to be teaching some of the brightest students in the country, even the prestige of teaching at the premier university was being eroded by the more pressing need to survive.

“Because of their meager salaries, most UP teachers can only afford to live in rented apartments on or outside their campuses,” Simbulan said. And those who stayed on campus “dreaded” the day of their retirement, knowing they would be evicted from their subsidized housing facilities, he added.

“Professors who are too old to shift careers are forced to peddle insurance plans and real estate, chorizo, and even cemetery plots to augment their income,” Simbulan said in his report.

The meager compensation based on the Salary Standardization Law was a “pittance compared to what is given to professors in leading private universities,” he said.

According to the 2006 report of the UP Ad Hoc committee to review tuition and other fees, a full professor at UP is paid P13,686 per teaching load unit—well below the P27,971 at De La Salle University and P18,600 at Ateneo de Manila University.

A UP associate professor receives P11,019, while his/her counterparts at La Salle and Ateneo receive P18,312 and P15,400, respectively. For UP assistant professors, the basic rate is P9,033. At La Salle and Ateneo the rates are P13,645 and P11,000, respectively. UP instructors get P7,098, while those in La Salle and Ateneo receive P9,454 and P7,600, respectively.


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Totoo ba ito? Kawawa naman pala itong mga profs sa UP. Mababa pala sahod. Ano ba ibig sabihin ng "per teaching load unit"?

Sa baba ng sahod nila, baka may mag-side line na rin sa kanila ng tusino or Avon sa campus.