(Part 1)
In 1989, when I joined a group of university professors and business people to found the CRC College of Arts and Sciences (CRC-CAS) that was the precursor of the University of Asia and the Pacific (UAP), we decided to start with four undergraduate specializations.
The first obvious one was Industrial Economics, the field associated with the very start of the Center for Research and Communication (CRC) in 1967. CRC was established as a think tank by Dr. Jesus Estanislao to do research and train personnel in the field of industrial economics that was not offered at that time by any Philippine college or university. It was logical, therefore, that the first undergraduate offering of CRC-CAS would be in this field. The second specialization was also readily identified, i.e., business management or business administration, the most closely allied program with industrial economics. This was the precursor of the present School of Management of UA&P, the largest in enrollment among the existing schools of the university and the first one to offer a Master of Science in Management.
The founders of CRC-College came out with an innovative idea, inspired by the fact that CRC started its educational history by offering in 1969 a Master in Science in Industrial Economics (MSIE) when then Secretary of Education Onofre (O.D.) Corpuz was sufficiently progressive to break the rules by allowing us to offer a Master’s degree without a corresponding undergraduate offering in the same specialization. In fact, I remember distinctly that the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) was allowed to offer an MBA only on the condition that it was a joint venture of the Ateneo University and De La Salle University. As then Dean of the Graduate School of Business of De La Salle, I was in the working committee that gave rise to AIM with the help of the Ford Foundation and Harvard University.
Because of our unique condition of already having a masteral program in Industrial Economics even before having an equivalent undergraduate program, we thought of a game-changing way to offer a masteral degree. We asked permission from the Department of Education to offer a straight five-year curriculum that would allow some of our more academically gifted undergraduate students to obtain a masteral degree in industrial economics or management (and later in other fields) in five years. In my view back then, such a program would enable the best and brightest of our students to start their professional life already with a master’s degree as a foundation either for a few of them to work for a doctorate, or for the rest to continue upskilling and reskilling themselves with short certificate courses throughout their professional lives, without the need to go back to school to obtain another academic degree (except, of course, a doctoral degree).
I am proud of the fact that those who obtained our Master Science in Management (MSIM) have risen in the management world without having to take the more expensive route of an MBA — which usually requires first working for three to four years after college, and then spending a big sum of money, in addition to the opportunity cost involved in having to stop working for remuneration for some 18 months that are usually the conditions in a full time MBA program in AIM or other graduate business schools, especially in the prestigious business schools in the US like Harvard, Wharton, Chicago, or Columbia or in Europe like IESE, INSEAD, or IMD.
We introduced other Straight Bachelor’s plus Master’s programs in other fields. Thus, we have the Master of Arts in Integrated Marketing, Master of Arts in Media and Entertainment Management, Master of Arts in the Humanities, and Master of Arts in Political Economy with Specialization in International Relations and Development, in addition to the Master of Science in Industrial Economics and Master of Science in Management.
With the introduction of the K to 12 Curriculum, we introduced the six-year Integrated University Program (6YP) which is a seamless and integrated program with three distinct phases: the first two years are Senior High School (or Junior College), the next three years are the Bachelor’s program, and the final year, if the student qualifies, is the Master’s program with the same masteral offerings as the five-year straight bachelor’s plus master’s programs.
To my mind, these various masteral programs, which can be completed by anyone with sufficient intellectual capacity and financial means (including generous scholarship programs for the economically disadvantaged) at the average age of 23, can prepare any knowledge worker for a lifetime of upskilling and reskilling through shorter courses or seminars covering breakthroughs in technology and management sciences.
From the demographic point of view, it also allows marriages at earlier ages so that our country will not fall into the same demographic trap that has victimized practically all the advanced countries in which late marriages have been a factor in the precipitous drop in fertility rates. It is difficult for a country to maintain the 2.1 babies per fertile woman required to avoid significant declines in population if couples increasingly marry in their thirties or forties.
For these reasons, I was glad to learn that one of the best business schools in the world, the IESE Business School in Barcelona and Madrid, Spain, has introduced a shorter course leading to a Master in Management that can be taken by qualified college graduates in any specialization, most of them with ages from 23 to 25. Although the traditional MBA program that requires three or four years of work after graduating from college will always be attractive to many with the intellectual capacity and financial means, this alternative means of getting a Master in Management is beginning to attract an increasing number of college graduates from the likes of Ateneo, De La Salle University, and the University of the Philippines. In fact, I have been personally advising my grandnephews and grandnieces and those of my close friends to seriously consider the MiM of IESE as an alternative to the MBA, either in the same business school or elsewhere in the US, Europe, or Asia.
Here let me share with my readers (both parents and children) some basic information about the IESE Business School, with which my university, the UA&P, has an academic partnership. Modesty aside, I would be the most knowledgeable person in the Philippines about this leading business school because I got in contact with it during its foundational years.
Just five years after it was established with some help from the Harvard Business School in 1958, I spent an academic year as a young research fellow in its very elegant premises in Barcelona. While completing my Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard University, I had met some of their founding professors who were taking short courses at Harvard Business School. They invited me to spend a year on their campus in Barcelona after I got my doctoral degree in 1963. I can really say that I was the first Filipino to know of the existence of the school that would become one of the best business schools in the world today, sometimes even ranking higher than Harvard in some categories of business education. For example, year after year in the Financial Times’ ranking of business schools all over the world, IESE is rated Number One in the offering of customized management training programs for business enterprises. In the MBA category, it is among the top 10.
It is always worth noting that among the enrollees in the first MBA batch of IESE in 1966 were two De La Salle graduates — Joseph Delano Bernardo who in later years became the Philippine Ambassador to Spain during the presidency of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and late real estate entrepreneur Cecilio (Tagan) Reyes.
(To be continued.)
Bernardo M. Villegas has a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard, is professor emeritus at the University of Asia and the Pacific, and a visiting professor at the IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. He was a member of the 1986 Constitutional Commission.
