Macahig: We were only given a week to provide the list of grantees’ for B2HELP grant

By Prince Leander Palalon | February 11, 2021

Commision on  Higher Education (CHED) informed High Education Institutions (HEI) that they are given 30 slots on the PHP300 million budget B2HELP grant through a Zoom meeting in the last week of November 2020.

Silliman University was able to acquire an additional 10 slots from remaining slots unutilized by other HEIs, securing a total of 40 slots for senior students.

According to Office of Registrar and Admissions (ORA) Director Dr. Giovanni Macahig, the grant was required to be completed by December 1, thus the university was only given a week to provide the list of grantees. 

The guidelines of the program mandate the institutions to choose the grantees and apply for them. The grantees were chosen based on the year level and remaining tuition balance.

“These are the process of selecting the students,” Dr. Macahig explained in an interview. “Number one, we check the balances of the enrolled college students in the first semester of 2020-2021 as of November 26, 2020. Then we prepare a list of all fourth year level students with outstanding balances arranged from largest to smallest balance.  Three, we eliminated the students who were not enrolled in [the] school year 2019-2020 from the list, then we eliminated students with CHED DOST [and] other governemnt scholarships, SSS loans, GSIS, student loans, and other scholarships from Silliman or institutional scholarships. We chose the top 40 students with large balances, that is how we were able to choose.“

Dr. Macahig added that the reason behind Silliman not being able to inform grantees was because of the given guidelines, the limited number of slots, the limited budget, and the limited amount of time given to process the application.

“Students may think that why they weren’t informed about this. Exactly, because of the guidelines. The guidelines specifically mandates the institution to do the processing. The procedure is not the same as other scholarships and grants [like] Tulong Dunong  program that we announce and we give them (students) time to apply like other CHED grants,” said the ORA director. 

The office requested CHED for a one week extension to process the documents of 40 grantees.

“When we processed all these documents, it’s not just giving out the list to CHED. We also have two attachments, we also have to notarize documents, request their ID numbers, etc. and other information that are required,” Dr. Macahig explained.

The list of grantees was submitted on December 1, 2020. The grant is now being processed into Silliman’s account and once completed, the ORA and Finance offices will begin crediting the PHP 5,000  into the grantee’s account. 

“I’m happy that the university, through our office, was able to provide at least 40 (slots), we could have given more… Hopefully, if there are still remaining slots available, they could give us more,” Dr. Macahig stated.

The ORA director shared that the B2HELP grant is just “one of the many programs” by CHED. Scholarship grants and subsidies such as UniFAST, Tulong Dunong scholarship, and many more are announced and given at the beginning of the school year. 

“We make the announcements after CHED communicates with us to open the announcements for so and so scholarships and subsidies.”

Here is the list of CHED B2HELP grantees: