Sofia Nicole P. Artienda
|September 5, 2026
Every high school graduation season, I witness social media—and this year, my email inbox—become a brutal battlefield for the future, split down the middle. Scrolling on one screen, bright, bold banners read, “Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you …”
On the other, a continuous scroll of eerie text boxes state, “Thank you! We regret to inform you …”
For hundreds of thousands of young dreamers, those words carry the weight of an entire Filipino fate. As most youth from the masses reach the threshold of adulthood, they face a harsh reality colder than what college life ought to be: entrance exam rejections won’t define you. The system will.
Coming from the provinces, far from the polished prep culture of the capital, college isn’t just a next step but an unimaginable expense. If you talked to some of my peers in my hometown and asked, “What are your plans for college?” the answer would be a shrug, “Probably work, Tesda [Technical Education and Skills Development Authority];” or a defeated, “I don’t even think I’m qualified for that.”
Success is subjective and isn’t defined by just completing a bachelor’s degree; still, I am a firm believer that education is one of the best chain breakers of generational poverty.
After taking entrance exams, checking up on each other’s status was the first thing that my friends and I did. Long before we chose our strands, we were explicitly warned that competitive entrance exams and most scholarships favor STEM. As busy students juggling classes, organization work, and side hustles, we often found ourselves gambling on pure luck with unfamiliar topics.
English, science, and mathematics are ultimately taken as general knowledge. But to those from non-STEM strands and underfunded public high schools, that “general knowledge” becomes a threat. Well-funded institutions’ students naturally hold the advantage through advanced facilities, specialized curricula, and review programs. The rest of us must either be exceptionally gifted or exert ten times the effort just to stand on the same starting line.
I can still vividly picture our old, beloved classroom, with our science teacher running out of time each class and even allotting extra minutes to accommodate missed junior high lessons for us to grasp them better and catch up without any judgment. Right then, maybe you’d start to understand the terrifying depth of our gap. For students with a stronger academic foundation, those complex lessons would be a simple recap.
This is the actual, daily lens through which students from underserved sectors have looked for years. It is vividly evident that, up until now, there has been no concrete solution made by higher-ups to address the college-ready life of high school students. Sadly, most students are still not prepared for the supposed baseline and standards universities expect.
It is absurd to expect universities to lower their academic standards or ask privileged students to adjust to what the marginalized lack. Universities are meant to pursue academic excellence, but a deep sense of inferiority naturally develops alongside more privileged students.
Thousands of applicants end up internalizing a sense of disparity, mistaking a lack of quality education for a lack of personal potential—which, I firmly believe, should be examined with holistic evaluations that account for socioeconomic and regional starting lines.
And when it comes to the tertiary level, the higher education sector suffers chronic budget changes, making allotted slots shrink each year. Look no further than the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, the most populated state university in our country, where over 125,000 applicants for AY 2026–2027 fought for barely 20,000 slots system-wide.
Even amid the wave of congratulatory posts online from incoming scholars, a profound weight of devastation from rejections rests just beneath the digital noise. Relief for a few cannot disguise the harsh truth for the majority: as budget cuts choke the educational sector, entrance exams are no longer meant to measure potential—they contribute to aggressively eliminating applicants.
If education is truly the pillar of a “Bagong Pilipinas,” where does that leave the thousands forced to watch their dreams slip away from behind closed doors?
Here are the actual results we have to face, my dearest “Iskolar ng bayan”: Congratulations! We regret to inform you that you have successfully passed into another level of an education system designed to fail you.
It is time to hear not just the grief of disappointments, but the systemic neglect behind every rejection letter. What will happen to the youth, the hope of the nation, when the system has turned its back on them?
The Filipino youth must never be waitlisted from their own dreams.
