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The experience of upskilling, reskilling, and retooling personnel at the Center for Research and Communication (CRC) with industrial and business economists encouraged Jess Estanislao and those of us who teamed up with him to identify other professional manpower gaps that existed in the late 1960s and the decade of the 1970s. Since we were all interested in the field of economics (our media partner was the late Ambassador Jose Romero Jr., who was the Business Editor of the Manila Bulletin), we lamented the fact that at that time there was a general lack of economic literacy among the educated population. Those who were supposed to be teaching economics at the high school and college levels were generally not economics majors and came from all sorts of other disciplines. There was a need to upskill and reskill them in the science of economics, which was getting increasingly complex (and mathematical). So, our next important upskilling initiative, with the help of the Ford Foundation, was to offer a non-degree program in economics education, especially for teachers who came from the Mindanao region. The classes were offered during the summer months. During the school year, we professors would travel far and wide in the island of Mindanao to tutor the participants in the Program on effective means of teaching economics, either in high school or college. We forged a special partnership with the network of Notre Dame schools all over Mindanao. I remember traveling to remote areas at that time like Marbel and Dadiangas (now General Santos City) with very poor country roads. During the oil crisis of the early 1970s, I remember being stranded in the middle of nowhere with one of my CRC colleagues in Southern Mindanao because the bus in which we were riding ran out of gasoline. A Good Samaritan in the person of a pharmaceutical salesperson rescued us.
Once again, the very progressive leadership of Secretary of Education O.D. Corpuz at that time enabled us to get authorization to convert this upskilling program into a degree-giving course that ended with a Master in Economics Education. We were proud of the fact that many of the graduates from that program ended up as Supervisors, College Deans, and even top government officials, as in the case of Synergeia Founder, Milvida (Nene) Guevarra, who also served as an Undersecretary of Finance. Just recently, I met other products of this reskilling program in economics education who reached top management levels in the securities market, like Marita Araullo Limlingan, who became President of Regina Capital Development Corporation; Lulu Altamirano Berrig, who was Trade Policy Adviser at the Philippine Mission to the World Trade Organization in Geneva; Corazon Paguia Rodriguez, who was Dean and Professor of the Asian Institute of Management; and Teresa Meris Borra, who became the Director of the Energy Planning and Monitoring Bureau of the Department of Energy.
It was clear that the upskilling program in economics education was a stopgap measure at that time. The masteral program no longer exists today in our curriculum at the University of Asia and the Pacific (UA&P) because there is now a proliferation of masteral programs in economics (starting with that of the University of the Philippines) that produce excellent teachers of economics for our high schools and universities. As an aside, those programs of upskilling in economics education in the 1970s and 1980s prompted me to write a series of textbooks in economics, the most popular of which was entitled “Guide to Economics for Filipinos.” I still meet professionals today who are already in their fifties and sixties who tell me that they used those textbooks I authored in the high schools or colleges from which they graduated.
Our exposure to teachers in the Economics Education programs inspired us to address another big manpower gap in the teaching profession at that time. Grade schools and high schools, especially the public ones, purported to inculcate certain human values that strengthen the character among the students. Values education was a serious concern among school officials. There was, however, no systematic way of forming the right values—such as honesty, industry, concern for the common good, work discipline, humility, temperance, and cleanliness—among the youth. Some of the Secretaries of Education, especially La Salle Brother Andrew (Macario Gonzalez), encouraged us to develop a course for teachers on values education. We were fortunate that there was a leading German foundation called the Hans Seidel Stiftung that decided to support the development of the program financially. Although, like the other programs we developed to address a shortage of skilled manpower, it was meant to be a non-degree upskilling program, the Department of Education had already gotten used to dealing with us with liberality and granted us the license to offer a Masters in Values Education (MAVE). A member of our faculty who spearheaded these programs on Values Education, Dr. Antonio (Tonton) Torralba, up to this day is working with a good number of private foundations, helping teachers and parents implement values education programs among pupils in both public and private schools. Dr. Torralba also spearheaded the writing of many teaching materials on values education that are still being used at the elementary and high school levels today.
Many of our graduates from the Masteral Program in Industrial Economics were hired to head the Economic Research Unit or Corporate Planning Division of leading business corporations. As they built their respective staffs, they realized that there was a shortage of economic research personnel. That prompted us to start another upskilling program among college graduates, whatever their undergraduate specializations, who wanted to make economic research a beginning career on the way to the top of the management ladder. This gave rise to the Master in Economic Research (MER) program, which today has evolved into the Master in Applied Business Economics (MABE). In a recent UA&P event in Cebu, I met a secular priest who was all praises for this MABE course, which he had just completed. He said it prepared him to effectively manage the finances of the Archdiocese of Cebu. Experiences like this have inspired us to offer short upskilling and retooling programs for members of the Catholic Clergy in the field of Church management.
The most successful reskilling program, both in terms of the number of participants and financial contribution to UA&P, is the Strategic Business Economics Program (SBEP). Very early on in 1974, as we became famous for giving economic briefings to top executives, we at CRC realized that even the most highly trained business executives who obtained MBA degrees from such prestigious schools as Harvard, Wharton, Columbia, Chicago, and Northwestern lacked sufficient understanding of how a developing economy like the Philippines worked. They had an inferiority complex when they had to talk about monetary, fiscal, trade, and other macroeconomic policies with such officials as the Governor of the Central Bank, the Secretary of Finance, the NEDA Director General, and other high economics officials. They still had to digest data like GDP per capita, debt-to-GDP ratio, rates of inflation, interest rate policy, etc. Some of them approached us to develop a program for top executives on economics as applied to business. That was how the Strategic Business Economics Program (SBEP) began in 1974. SBEP is a unique executive education program that combines the powerful discipline of economics with the best and cutting-edge practices of business. Today, as it did fifty years ago, it aims to equip top brass corporate executives, high-ranking government officials, and entrepreneurs to craft innovative strategies and robust business models in the ever-changing global, regional, and national environments. To be continued.
