STI Education Services Group bares offerings
IT IS a story often told and repeated — a Filipino goes abroad, finds gainful employment, and makes sure to remit money home primarily to send his or her children to school.
Today, education still remains a top financial priority in Filipino families, according to Monico V. Jacob, vice-chairman and CEO of STI Education Services Group, Inc., one of the largest networks of academic institutions in the country. He noted that a large percentage of students in the STI system are being sent to school by an overseas worker, whether a parent or other family members. This also shows how families truly value education and how they would exert concert effort just to provide children the opportunity to go to school.
There are also parents who are entrepreneurs running businesses or corporate employees. “Whatever the circumstance, the motivation to work and to earn enough is to see their children through college,” he said.
According to Mr. Jacob, education is a great equalizer. “Filipinos have always seen education as an investment in a way that their efforts and resources go into having their children gain opportunities that they never had — opportunities to make wise decisions, make a good living, and to ultimately improve the quality of their lives,” explained Mr. Jacob.
In 1983, STI was formed to offer information technology (IT) and ITbased education. The founders saw the growing need then for IT-savvy workers and decided to focus on filling this niche. From the start, STI’s philosophy has been “first we teach you, then we hire you,” according to Jacob.
STI expanded very rapidly with its promise of quality education and support for gainful employment after graduation. The expansion was not just in terms of number of schools in various urban centers throughout the country, but also in terms of evolving from a technical-vocational school into a mature tertiary institution.
Aside from its flagship degree in IT, STI now offers degrees in hospitality management, tourism management, business management, computer engineering, and arts and sciences. It also presently has 77 STI-branded campuses and one university. “STI is present in every major urban center and has over 105,000 students enrolled in college and in senior high school,” reports Jacob.
With the government’s recent implementation of the K to 12 program, thereby increasing the number of years of basic education from 10 years to 12 years, STI has also transitioned its campuses into senior high school institutions offering the Department of Education’s prescribed tracks such as accountancy, business, and management (ABM), humanities and social sciences (HUMSS), science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), information technology, home economics, and industrial arts.