Bulacan Facebook Groups Are Selling Congressional Scholarship Letters for ₱3,000 a Signature
CHED-administered grants from DepEd channels move quietly between buyers and sellers in Cavite and Bulacan group chats. Everyone involved knows the price.
Open any Bulacan or Cavite buy-and-sell Facebook group between June and August and you will scroll past the usual ukay hauls and used phones to find something stranger: scholarship endorsement letters with a price next to them. Sometimes the post says "slot available, PM for details." Sometimes the seller is bolder and writes the figure outright. The going rate in chat screenshots circulating among college freshmen sits between ₱2,500 and ₱5,000, depending on which congressional office signed it.
The grants getting traded most are the CHED-administered ones routed through DepEd channels and legislator endorsements. Students who actually qualify on paper are losing slots to buyers whose only credential is a working GCash.
How the slot becomes a product
The mechanics are not complicated. A legislator's office gets an allocation of endorsement slots each academic year. Staff are supposed to vet applicants. In practice, the staff have cousins, the cousins have group chats, and the group chats have buyers. The endorsement letter itself is the bottleneck, because without it the application does not move at CHED's processing window.
A buyer pays for the letter, submits it with the standard requirements, and the grant lands in a bank account. The seller gets cash. The legislator's name stays on the press release about youth empowerment. Nobody files a complaint because everyone in the chain got what they came for.
The kids who can't pay
The students who lose are the ones who actually need the money. A senior high graduate in Plaridel whose family cannot raise ₱3,000 in liquid cash is competing against a buyer in Imus whose parents treat the fee as a tuition discount. Both submit the same forms. Only one walks in with the endorsement that gets the file stamped.
Advocacy groups working on education access have flagged this for years. The complaint reaches the same dead end every time: no signed affidavit, no named seller, no case. The Facebook posts get deleted, the group chats migrate, and the next semester opens with the same listings.
Why DepEd's CHED-routed grants in particular
Several reasons. The endorsement requirement creates a chokepoint that a single staffer can monetize. The grant amounts are large enough to justify a four-figure bribe and small enough that auditors do not chase individual files. The application windows are short, which pressures families into paying for speed rather than waiting for legitimate processing.
And the paper trail favors the office, not the student. If a complaint surfaces, the letter looks valid, the signatory denies knowledge, and the burden of proving the transaction falls on a 17-year-old who paid in cash through a relative.
What the buyers say when you ask
Students who paid will tell you, off the record, that they did not think of it as corruption. They thought of it as a processing fee, the same way LTO fixers are a processing fee, the same way barangay clearances are a processing fee. The vocabulary of bribes in this country is the vocabulary of customer service.
The cost lands on the kid in Hagonoy whose tuition deposit is due Monday and whose family does not have ₱3,000 to spare for a signature that was supposed to be free. She will defer enrollment. The buyer in Bacoor will post a graduation photo in four years. The legislator will run again.
