Congratulations to Shamcey Supsup, Miss Universe 2011 third runner-up, who showed the world how the Filipina holds her own against the world. Shamcey is a product of the UP education system, where quick wits and street smarts are part of basic training. She proved that people from UP perform well anywhere.
The quality of our people, however, outshines the quality of our infrastructure and facilities. UP is architecturally a beautiful place, but it is not simply a public park to be enjoyed. Its chief mandate is to enlist and prepare top high school students to contribute to national development.
UP is a 13-campus public university which has been under-funded for years. For 10 years now, the national government has granted, on the average, only 45 percent of the budget that UP proposes for every year. For 2012, the government has offered to finance only 32 percent of what UP believes it needs to build a world-class university.
UP subsists on a budget which does not afford modernization, much less the construction of the facilities and amenities it needs to compete with the topmost educational institutions in the world. Some of its crucial equipment are decades-old, out of form or obsolete. UP cannot fund growth and expansion especially for laboratory-dependent fields such as science and technology.
This deficiency in material development influences the substance of our education. Such adverse effects are countered largely by the intrinsic resourcefulness and capability of our UP students. Still, our personal and physical assets can only go so far: to achieve “inner beauty,” so to speak, we need strong foundations and the money to do so much.
—KRISSY CONTI,
krissy.conti@gmail.com