The changing demographics of the University of the Philippines Diliman has been the topic of discussion lately in campus and outside. The trigger? That infamous Feb 13 (a.k.a. gabi ng mga taksil) Bamboo concert riot. Now concert riots isn’t strange to Diliman. Every year since these concerts were first staged, there is a ruckus of sorts. I was an undergrad when there was an averted riot in Regine Velasquez’ concert in 1988 or was it 1989? UP Diliman fair. The lumpen proletariat didn’t find it amusing that the organizers walled off the Sunken Garden with 15 feet of tall sawali to prevent kibitzers (who didn’t want to shell cash for tickets) from viewing the concert from the 1) top of BA, 2) top of Vinzons’ 3) top of Educ and 4) top of PHAN.
Anyway that Feb 14 is memorable since a freak thunderstorm let loose ONLY in the Sunken Garden and flooding Regine’s concert. Weird! In nearby Maginhawa Street where we had beer, it was dry! That made the lumpen proletariat dance with Schadenfreude!
But that was way waaaaay before the age of 3G cellphones and iPods. My students of the conyo type have said that their friends have lost 1) iPhones, 2) the latest Nokia N whatever, 3) iPod nanos in these concerts from the “jumping jologs” who have made an art of snatching these goodies from jumping conyos in concerts. The jumping jologs have made it an art to flash icepicks to the conyo crowd.
Now I told my students. Why would one bring an iPhone or an iPod to a Bamboo concert?
(When we were young, the concerts were sedate. No one was jumping madly when the then unknown jazzy violinist John Lesaca played and the Eraserheads were a light year below the horizon and Martin Nievera was then a student in Senora Profesora Paz Miciano’s Spanish 1 class!)
BTW, that this issue became a hot potato in Diliman (nothwithstanding a UP police officer mortally injured in the melee) reflects the changing perception of space and security in Diliman and the changing demographics. Diliman is the last of the UP campuses to become a gated one. Access to UPLB has been controlled even in the 1980s. Access to UPV is also restricted and you need to be in official business to enter UP Manila. But in the case of Diliman, there was a feeling of security that is now forever gone. Why? The violent incidents were not frat related but related to outsiders. The UP has begun to shut out the outside.
Diliman’s demographic has rapidly changed in the first decade of this century. The majority of students now belong to the upper middle class and in some colleges and departments, they predominate. Diliman was never “masa” like PUP is. But then it was the lower to mid-middle class that predominated. During the start of STFAP 20 years ago, most of the students were in the Bracket 6-7 category (the middle classes). Now with the new bracketing system many are in the bracket A and B categories with family incomes from 500K to more than 1M a year. Most students with your usual salaried employee parents (in the government and some in the private sector) fall in the Bracket C category (130K to 500K a year income). They pay60% of the tuition and full lab and other fees. Now even that 60% is becoming hard to come up in these trying times. So there is a call to expand the bracket C category or even restructure the fee schedules. Only about 2% of Diliman students are eligible in the lowest Bracket D class where they pay no fees and get a stipend.
The shift is towards the upper classes and that is clearly reflected in the demographics. That’s why businesses catering to that demographic such as what we see in the UP-Ayala Technohub will make a killing. Diliman wags have told me that the Technohub has given a habitat to the UP Conyo population that was otherwise restricted to the AS parking lot where the Upsilonians used to hang out!
But unlike the Ateneo conyo habitats on Katipunan, the Technohub is more secure. It will be hard to rob the conyos of their laptops with Ayala’s eagle eyed guards and security searches!
Profs like me will have to accept these changes and not dwell on the mythical “masa” image of the Diliman student. As Maris Diokno once said, no amount of giving palugit and affirmative action in the UPCAT can change the inevitable. The root is really in Philippine society’s inequity in all aspects, especially in education.
It is tempting to convert these students to the Dark Side (the Tibak). Very few of them have heard or seen of the urban poor scurrying in the Diliman campus and that they eat only once a day, the famous altanghap!
Maybe I should try to turn them into tibaks but without the communist inanity!
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blackshama sir,
I’ve been waiting for you to write about the incident.
Almost a generation ago, I was among those who inhabited Diliman but I was a ‘barbarian’.
So the UP police officer who was bludgeoned by the hooligans has died?
Last I monitored he was comatose.:(
http://midfield.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/hooliganism-in-up-diliman/
I like UP guys…they would kill for their frat bros hahahahahaha
Or..kill their own frat bro during initiations hahahahaha
why not use these jologs to drive the chinese from the kalayaan and scarborough shoals, arm them with ice picks, and give them each a used i-pod and cell phone?
or a baseball bat bwihihihi
During my time, the Eraserheads were just starting and were Diliman students themselves and would perform in the UP Fair. We all thought how lousy performers they were then (halos batuhin sila away from the stage at one point) but their songs even then had a certain orig melodic vibe despite the lousy instruments.
If the upper classes now predominate in UP, then it is a reflection that our primary and secondary education is in dire or serious trouble, providing substandard education to the people, majority of whom are from the lower socio-economic brackets. UP as the premier state university is supposed to be representative of the social make-up of the country.
as for me…i wouldnt send my son/daughter to UP diliman…maybe in other UP campus. Getting good education doesnt necessarily mean you have to go to UP(diliman)..those days are gone. I’ve had a chance to working with and lead a team consisting of guys/girls from UP, DLSA, UST, Ateneo, AIM, a college in botoan city (cant remember the name)…they were all the same…the guy from botoan was performing just as well as the people from the “prestigious” schools…no extraordiary output from them…
I had my education from the cheapest engineering school in the visayas during that time…but I am able to make my way up against those who came from the mentioned schools..
at the end of the day..its not the school…its the student. Nowadays, you can find all the resources you need from the net…and you can learn almost everything you want to learn..on the net.
so..UP, DLSA, Ateneo…whatever…to me it doesnt matter..im going to hire people from whatever unknown shools..as long as they have the attitude and determination to succeed.
DLSU pala…potek hehe
Those firebrand activists become finally part
of the establishment. Just part of growing up…
to Juwan_D: attitude and determination to succeed are not the only basis for choosing from a set of applicants. “Fit-for-purpose” and “can-hit-the-ground-running” are important, too. For example, for a call-center-position into a banking helpdesk, the edge goes to a candidate with good fluency in the English language and banking/commerce terminology.
“Can-hit-the-ground-running” is especially relevant for professionals who will work with sophisticated machines. A radiologist grad from metro-Manila or Baguio would have had more time and familiarity with X-ray machines than a radiologist from Ozamis or GenSan City.
And here is a rule-of-thumb : The less sophisticated your boss’s boss is, the easier to justify paying premium for name-brand.
UP n grad…
I agree…but then again…it all depends on what area of expertise you are into…in my line of work, it doesnt matter what school you are from..because what we do, its not being taught in any schools in the Philippines..at least for now. You will learn all the basics in school, but to actually do the real work, you’re going to start from the bottom…and this gave someone from low-level schools the same ground as those who came from prestigious schools…all of them starts learning the same thing at the same time..and like I said, it didnt matter what school each of them came from…all of them made the same result..and there were no extra-ordinary results from those who came from prestigious schools.
well apart from the way the talk..like “sir lets make tusok tusok na with the fishball”hehehe
makes sense, your comments about “it depends” and there are many jobs where the differences between a UP-Diliman ad a Univ-Nueva Caceres college training are not worth much.
Now here is another question: are there things other than “..a good education with 9 units of this; 15 units of that” that one gets from a UP-Diliman or La Salle, Ateneo and other schools that charge high tuition fees?
Doesn’t it look like the ones who move up the corporate ladder faster are the graduates of UP-Diliman and the other schools that charge high tuition fees? Everything else being equal, doesn’t a La Salle or UP Diliman grad have an edge especially 10 or 15 years into their working careers?
You are bragging Juwan, of course you are bragging. A UP/Ateneo/AIM, etc. graduate will not work under you in a slum area eating tusok fishball with you. They ought to be up there in high rise building in Makati or Ortigas and eating shasimi, heheh.
I wonder why no tech blogger has talked about Technohub yet. Sounds like an incubator but no one seems as excited as it should be.
Blackshama, I’m sure Ateneans envy UP’s access to the Hub. Maybe the Ayalas can let in other students as well? Katipunan is such a noisy place and there’s no noise control.
Bert,
hahahaha you really dont like me.
You’ll be surprised. hahaha
UP n grad,
again..it depends…it wasnt that way in my personal experience.
“so..UP, DLSA, Ateneo…whatever…to me it doesnt matter..im going to hire people from whatever unknown shools..as long as they have the attitude and determination to succeed.”
Agree ako dyan Juan_D hehe.Plus the relevant competency of course. Make perfect sense.
UP grads have the edge in jobs involving yakking and out of the box creativity. From my experience with students and that of my friends in the HRM biz, UP grads usually don’t do well in jobs that are fairly routine. They get bored and some HR people think they are “pasaway”.
Maybe the yakking is not a UP monopoly but perhaps the combination of being pasaway, sutil and out-of-the-box creativity is. One thing seems to be sure according to my ex students, if the boss is more bobo than the UP alum, the alum becomes more pasaway.
Well I told him that we can’t have UP alums as bosses all the time. Kailangan marunong ka makisama.
But unlike Ateneans according to friends in HR, UP grads do not demand high salaries from the start. UP grads have been known to choose the lower paying jobs for the psychic rewards of being “pasaway”!
BTW nobody has written about Technohub because perhaps it’s hard to get there. You need a car and crossing Commonwealth is an almost sure ticket to the otherworld!
Graduates of UP, DLSU and Ateneo…Im not into this kind of people…We have had so many leaders coming from this schools…what have they done for this country??? what have they done to the Filipino people? NOTHING!!! All of them are/were good at robbing and stealing money from the people…thats what they are good at…pareho lang sila sa mga politikong nagtapos sa ibang schools…pareho lang silang magaling mangurakot at walang magawa para isaayos ang bansa natin…
kaya pwede ba…itigil na ang pagiging malaki ng ulo at mahangin na utak kung ikaw ay glaing sa mga paaralan na to…
puro kahambugan lang!!!
Please surprise me Juwan, I might be surprised yet. But it’s not true that I don’t like you. On the contrary I’m amused and kinda like your style.
Except when you say there’s nobody out there, as if nobody talaga (but GMA), heheh.
Bert,
Im glad to know that..
by the way..i didnt say “there’s nobody out there but GMA”…I said, with the current lineup of presidential aspirants…walang hindi katulad ni GMA na kurakot…Im sure there is someone na pwedeng karapat dapat maging presidente..baka andito siya sa FV..we dont know..pero sa kasalukuyang politiko ng bansa…pareho lang silang lahat..mga kurakot at pangungurakot lang ang inaatupag at aatupagin nila.
I used to admire MLQ3…pero nung nakipagbesobeso na sya kay JDV3 sa last impeachment complaint nila..binawi ko na ang pag-admire ko sa kanya hehehe
Kape tayo minsan..wag lang sa starbucks baka makasabay natin ang mga politiko bwihihihihi
@BrianB re: Technohub
According to my web developer friends it sounds like an incubator but is actually just a glorified virtual office space.
juwan d seems like one of those graduates who may be considered successful, not coming from the Big 3 schools, and now declaring that it’s not about the school.
but of course it is. not entirely, but to a big percentage. the 4 years of cultural experience, networking, and engaging of like-minded colleages and professors, that’s already a lot to invest on. an engineering student in UP may be reading the same books from an engineering student in PUP or PLM, but when it comes to overall employability, the average graduate of UP can fare better than the top graduates of those schools. that doesn’t mean those are bad schools, it’s just that UP already has the lead in terms of faculty, research, culture. this is true in other fields as well. in business, ateneo and la salle graduates are taught by experienced leaders and well trained professionals, so why would you hire management graduates from other schools? check the top companies in the philippines, and chances are they would prefer graduates of the big 3 for management roles.
the real achievers in UP are not the government leaders. they are usually unheard of, but if you check multinationals, a lot of senior employees and C-level executives are from UP and Ateneo. yes other schools also have representatives in those positions, but not a lot, and most of these are already excellent individuals, even prior to going to college. if you also check hospitals abroad, there are doctors from UP, UE, UST.
heck a lot of my friends and i in engineering even despise those “tibaks”, but it’s sad that those tiny percentage of students are the ones people know of UP; it’s the image we project to the media. little do they know, that a lot of successful leaders in the corporate world, come from UP, and so as the other top schools.
i’m from UP and i agree not everyone, not even a big percentage, of UP graduates are good. it depends on the field, and the character of the graduate of course. but that doesn’t mean the big 3 schools produce the same quality than the rest. that is why people choose to go there, and even willing to spend a lot, because they’re paying more than the academics. if i were to recommend someone who wants to take engineering, i’d say UP. for business courses, the big 3. for media and marketing, UP mass com and UA&P have good training, but doesn’t produce 100% quality (students in mascomm courses can still graduate by just being mediocre). for computer and IT, the big 4. etc.
Okay, this is a cross post but what the hell. That infamous Feb 13 Bamboo concert riot is just a symptom of a society and our youth breaking down. It is beginning to knock at the doors of your enclaves. It is calling your attention about the festering problem of poverty and uneducated masses that has gone for far too long. It can now be felt within your gated communities.
Consider this as wake up call to all of you who call yourselves students of UP, Ateneo, UST, La Salle, etc. (yeah, all that warm fuzzy feeling that goes with being a student of one of these “elite” universities and all. Inspite of a lot of business and political leaders that may have come from these universities, our country is still in the trash heaps of the world. So don’t kid yourselves too much by talking about “class”, “us vs them” and other imaginary “levels of society” that you think you belong and kid yourselves with. As long as the Philippines remains a third world country and as long as the number of uneducated masses is the overwhelming majority, these so called “elite” universities failed on it’s mandate and purpose and remains a third world university.