This might just be me complaining, ranting, raving about my own academic life. This might just be me being a bit of a sour-graper, as my classmates have graduated. Some have obtained their licenses in guidance and counselling. At the same time, I’m stuck working a 9-to-5 job that has great tenure but has graciously given me night terrors and feelings of dread and despair. You be the judge.In the Philippines, we like to believe that college is the great equaliser—the Golden Ticket to owning the factory and becoming a millionaire, billionaire, gazillionaire. Politicians campaign on the promise of free tuition. Families scrape together savings because they’re told education is the only way out of poverty. But the numbers tell us differently: higher education is not levelling the playing field. It is the gate to Willy Wonka’s treasures. Take enrollment and completion. A 2021 study of over 6,600 Filipino senior high school graduates found that both economic and cultural capital—such as parents’ education, extra-curricular participation, and community involvement—were strong predictors of college readiness. In the same year, four out of ten middle-class Filipinos had finished college, but only one out of seven low-income Filipinos did. Go back to 2015, and the gap looks even worse, with less than one per cent of youth from the poorest households having earned a degree, compared to more than a quarter of middle-class youth. Postgraduate education remains a rarity. According to UNESCO data, by 2019, one per cent of Filipinos aged 25 and over had at least a master’s degree. That’s less than one per cent of the total adult population. In other words, master’s degrees are still the luxury of the few, not the reality of many. Even more rare are doctorates. In 2019, merely 0.114% of Filipinos aged 25 and above had completed a doctoral or equivalent degree. At that level of scarcity, PhDs are not engines of mass mobility—they’re exclusive credentials, largely out of reach for the majority.Even at our top universities, privilege shows. A study of admissions at the University of the Philippines found that students from wealthier families were far more likely to get in—especially to their first-choice courses. Money buys better preparation, test scores, and even confidence. What is advertised as “merit” often just mirrors class advantage.The numbers speak volumes on institutional disparity. Out of over 2,200 higher education institutions (HEIs) nationwide, only 28% offer master’s programs, and just 14% offer doctorate programs. That means most regions and most colleges do not even provide a pathway for their students to pursue advanced degrees. The government tried to fix things with the Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education Act in 2017, which abolished tuition at state universities. It was hailed as historic! —but there’s a catch: free tuition mostly benefits those who were already likely to get in. If you can’t afford the review centres or didn’t attend a good high school, the door is shut before the tuition bill even arrives. And for professional tracks like medicine or engineering, subsidies don’t even come close to covering daily expenses.Then the pandemic came, and with it, another reminder that inequality doesn’t stop at the school gates. Students from poor households logged into online classes with unstable connections and shared devices—if they could log in at all. A 2023 study confirmed what every struggling student already knew: digital capital—the gadgets and internet access you take for granted if you’re middle-class—can shape whether you feel you belong in higher education at all. “No car, no iPhone, no opinion.”My cousin (hi, Ga! So proud of you; I hope you’re enjoying Japan), who is working and completing her master's at UPV, told me that student culture has changed since our time at university. The parking lot in front of Tomas Fonacier's building is always packed with cars, but not with teachers! Students’ cars fit together like one big jigsaw puzzle. In the hands of 17 to 20+ year-olds are iPhones. You seldom see a student with a smartphone priced under 10,000 PHP.I hate to sound like a Boomer, but back in our day, we walked all over the university and waited for tricycles to get to where we needed to go. We would go to computer shops to finish assignments without any AI assistance! When I finally got my laptop, I only visited computer shops to print documents. Our biggest flex was either going to a café whenever we studied or having a printer in our dorm rooms. Though it could take a considerable portion of our allowances, everyone seemed equal at first glance back then.In my master’s program, I know some classmates who took out loans of 200,000 PHP or more to cover their school expenses, despite being on a scholarship program. Some of us (including me) can’t afford to do that, especially when considering the time and money needed to attend classes weekly while working full-time— a job that doesn’t count as on-the-job training. For our thesis, we had to invest our time, money, and effort into finding participants and paying for in-university statisticians, grammarians, and ethics checkers. Again, I was enrolled in a government master’s scholarship program. Unfortunately, the university won’t even release our transcripts of records, even for a job change or promotion, which could improve our chances of completing the program. Not even a note saying, “hey, this is a student of ours trying to complete her master’s”!Education may be open in theory, but in practice, it’s still a club for the Veruca Salts of the world.The pattern is clear. Instead of being the ladder out of poverty, higher education often acts like a mirror, reflecting and amplifying the country’s class divisions. That helps explain why the Philippines still has one of the most unequal income distributions in Asia: the richest 1% capture 17% of all income, while the bottom half split just 14%. The education system, far from closing the gap, quietly sustains it.The Philippines has reduced poverty—from 49.2% in 1985 to 16.7% in 2018—but inequality persists. If we want universities to drive real social mobility, we have to stop congratulating ourselves on free tuition and start asking harder questions. How do we support more students from poor families, not just those already prepared to ace the tests? How do we support them so they don’t just enrol but actually graduate? How do we bridge the digital and cultural divides that make campuses alien territory for students who are the first to go to college in their families?Higher education operates as part of the class struggle. While marketed as a vehicle for social mobility, it frequently serves the opposite role: filtering out the poor, culling out the middle-class, and consolidating the advantages of the wealthy. Unequal access, selective admissions, the limits of tuition reforms, and cultural and digital divides all conspire to reproduce the country’s class hierarchy.Policymakers must stop treating higher education as a headline promise and start treating it as a justice issue. Universities must stop confusing privilege with merit. And We the People must stop accepting the myth that free tuition alone fixes inequality. We cannot afford a higher education system that reinforces class divides. If education is to be the ticket out of poverty, isn’t it better to have no gates to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory after all? REFERENCESPhilippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS). Institute underscores crucial role of graduate programs.https://pids.gov.ph/details/institute-underscores-crucial-role-of-graduate-programsIndex Mundi (UNESCO UIS data). Philippines – Educational attainment, at least Master’s or equivalent, population 25+, female (%) (cumulative).https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/philippines/educational-attainmentCommission on Higher Education (CHED). Higher Education Facts and Figures (2021).https://ched.gov.phPhilippine Statistics Authority (PSA). 2019 Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS).https://psa.gov.ph/content/functional-literacy-education-and-mass-media-survey-flemmsManasan, Rosario G. (2019). Who benefits and who should pay? An assessment of free tuition in state universities and colleges. Philippine Institute for Development Studies.https://pids.gov.ph/publication/discussion-papers/who-benefits-and-who-should-pay-an-assessment-of-free-tuition-in-state-universities-and-collegesDayagbil, F. et al. (2023). Digital capital and online learning in Philippine higher education during COVID-19. Asia Pacific Journal of Education.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02188791.2023.xxxxx