UAP program opens its doors to women

The entrepreneurial management program of the University of Asia and the Pacific (UAP) finally opened its doors to women wanting to take up Bachelor of Science in Entrepreneurial Management (BSEM), a 17-year old program that was designed to create new entrepreneurs and make graduates focus on creating new business ventures.

“For the past three years I have been trying to convince the top management of UAP to open the doors of EM program to ladies because it is a known fact that women are top performers in their chosen field since they are more determined to surmount whatever obstacles they meet in achieving their goals,” said Jose Navarro, UAP EM program director who also heads the continuing management education program.

EM seeks to bridge the gap between the swelling ranks of unemployed and the shortage of new industries to absorb the unemployed pool.

“By developing entrepreneurs among our youth and urging them to start and nourish their business ventures into full maturity, we are able to actively participate in economic growth of the country and be part of the so-called economic drivers,” Navarro told The STAR.

“We can’t continue looking at government for solutions. It is up to us—individual citizens— to come up with solutions to help reduce the growth pains of our society,” he added.

“Neither should we brag about our short-term benefit from a robust foreign currency remittance due to massive exodus of Filipino talents with its devastating impact on the Filipino family like drug addiction, a growing base of disturbed youth, immorality and materialism,” Navarro stressed.

While there are other business schools offering undergraduate degrees in entrepreneurship, none of them comes close to our EM program in terms of fields and clusters coverage, Navarro said.

UAP’s entrepreneurial management program graduates 35 to 40 a year which Navarro is tracking down to ensure that graduates actually apply what they have learned in school.

Navarro said he did a tracking three years ago of five batches of graduates which found out that 67 percent of graduates have put up and actively operate their businesses here or abroad.

“To me a 67 percent accomplishment is high and meaningful enough in showing how our school has positively contributed to economic growth,” Navarro said.

Other graduates prefer to be employed as consultants or executives of existing companies, he said.

“We can’t prevent our students from choosing corporate experience after graduation,” he said.

Still other graduates, he said, are “waiting to inherit the businesses from parents or relatives.”

UAP has very rigid entry requirements and maintains a student-faculty ratio of 14 to 1. The EM program also introduced Strategic Business Management (SBM) which links banks and financial institutions with micro finance institutions to lend to smaller borrowers in the countryside.

The SBM, for one, has benefited Ilocos Norte Gov. Bongbong Marcos (who graduated last year) in pursuing agri-tourism projects in his province. The provincial heads of Bataan and Aurora (of Senator Angara) are also now asking the help of Navarro and his SBM program to help develop their provinces in investment, tourism and agriculture.

The four-year program requires students to work during three summers in between academic years to expose them to the corporate setting early on and make them adjust to responsibilities and challenges they will face after graduation.

“The EM program is a race to maturity for our students. We want them to realize that college is not an extension of high school,” Navarro said.