When local universities excel
About 25 years ago, a Cebuano government official began a speech to some students in Cebu by saying that he, too, had attended their university, but had gone to the main campus in Metro Manila. “And there,” the man said, “lies the difference.”
As insensitive as the windbag’s comment was, it had some truth in it. Private universities in the capital region indeed had better facilities than those in the provinces, and state universities there received a bigger share of public resources. Recent feats by the University of San Carlos (USC) and the University of San Jose-Recoletos (USJR) in Cebu, as well as Silliman University in Dumaguete City, suggest the tide may be turning.
For USC, this month has been a stellar one, with four of its graduates placing first in the board exams for law, accountancy, and chemical engineering. The announcement yesterday that USC’s Wayne Lorenz Tandingan topped the May 2017 chemical engineering boards came on the heels of similar feats by fellow Carolinians like Vianca Pearl Amores and Marianito Jesus del Rio, who topped the CPA licensure exams, and Atty. Karen Mae Calam, who scored the highest in the 2016 Bar Exams.
Another graduate from Cebu who joined Tandingan in the chemical engineering board exam’s top 10 was Carlo Galicia of the Cebu Institute of Technology, who placed ninth. Unlike the latest Bar and CPA exam results, however, graduates of Manila-based schools took most of the spots, at seven out of 10.
When graduates of universities from outside the National Capital Region take most of the top spots in the board exams, it’s still surprising enough to make the news. A disappointing— but not entirely surprising—reaction was the disbelief expressed by some that graduates of schools in the provinces did so well. Perhaps the questions were in Bisaya?
Several local universities’ investments in their faculty and facilities are bearing fruit, not only in how well their graduates fared in licensure exams, but in their being designated as centers of excellence and centers of development. Centers of excellence (COE) are colleges and universities that have consistently done well in teaching and research in certain disciplines. Centers of development are those that show the potential to become COEs.
USJR—three of whose graduates also made it to the May 2017 accountancy board exams— is a center of development for accountancy education, according to the latest list from the Commission on Higher Education. USC is a COD in at least 10 disciplines and a COE in three others, including anthropology and chemistry. Both USC and USJR are centers of excellence in teacher education.
In time, more residents of the national capital will find fewer reasons to sneer at provincial graduates. They may even see that their presumed superiority is the more provincial and narrow-minded outlook.