Lydia B. Echauz, Outstanding Filipino

Congratulations to Far Eastern University (FEU) President Lydia Balatbat Echauz, one of this year’s The Outstanding Filipinos (TOFIL)!

There are many reasons that she deserves this recognition.

Echauz exemplifies the new breed of university presidents – professionally qualified, organizationally active, nationally engaged. Her proactive blending of the best of the academic and the business worlds has led to two major accomplishments: first, her steering the Graduate School of Business of De La Salle University to becoming one of only two Philippine graduate business schools to be ranked internationally (the other one is AIM), and second, her stewardship of Far Eastern University’s several linkages with business processing outsourcers and other industry leaders.

She has personally served as a bridge between academe and industry. She is extremely effective in bringing together academic and business leaders that usually have widely different views on how to educate the youth. Whether she invites them to campus as one-time lecturers or as part-time members of the faculty, these business leaders bring the two sectors closer together in terms of their philosophies of education. Instead of what often happens when the two fields interact – with business persons telling educators how to run their business and educators telling business persons that education is none of their business – intellectuals and managers, researchers and employers, scholars and executives, teachers and CEOs end up understanding each other and building a better educational system.

Her efforts have advanced the cause not just of education but of business itself, because she has made business more aware of the need for a well-rounded, non-utilitarian, liberal education, at the same that she has made education more responsive to national development needs.

Her research interests have enhanced her advocacy of educational issues among industry leaders. She has spent a lot of her time within industry itself, not only as a member of the board of various major corporations, but for a time as an active consultant in SM Prime Holdings and the Jaime V. Ongpin Institute of Business & Government. It may be said that her personal qualities overflow into her professional life, or as business writers like to put it, she walks the talk and talks the walk.

By applying best practices from industry to educational management, she has helped make FEU one of the most profitable publicly-listed corporations in the country. At the same time, she has ensured academic quality within FEU by instituting reforms in governance, recruitment and retention, and curriculum development.

The award is well-deserved, not only by Echauz but by educators in general. Unless my memory fails me, the last time the TOFIL award was given to an educator was in 2001, to DepEd’s Fortunata C. Villamar, then with the Polytechnic University of the Philippines. Were it not for other award-giving bodies such as Metrobank Foundation, teachers and administrators would remain unsung heroes, when we should all be singing their praises.

(For transparency’s sake, I should say that I work in FEU as Director of its Teachers Academy, its training arm for faculty. I would, however, write exactly this way were I not with FEU, believe it or not.)

LENGTHENING OUR EDUCATIONAL CYCLE: One question raised in a recent forum on the addition of pre-university to our education cycle was this – if our education cycle were really too short, how come so many Filipinos have been admitted to American graduate schools?

The number of years is based on the system, not on individuals nor even on quality of education. We (in CHED’s Technical Panel for General Education) are putting in a provision that students that do not need pre-university can validate the subjects and go straight from fourth year high school to first-year college.

I myself was accelerated twice in elementary school, making me the youngest in my all-boys high school class (I graduated at 14). Of course, I had a terrible case of classmate envy: I was restricted to reading books when my 16-year-old classmates were already discovering girls. But that has nothing to do with the system, only with my system.

Another question usually raised has to do with the Education Highway itself. How, say some, will we convince students to go to the polytechnic route rather than the university route, no matter what the scholastic achievement tests say?

Right now, parents will still do anything to get one or more of their children through college. In fact, the number of degree-granting institutions in the Philippines is ridiculously out of proportion to our population.

Before any genuine educational reform can push through in our country, one of the most deeply rooted desires of every Filipino has to be abandoned, namely, that of acquiring a college degree.

Now that more and more college-degree holders are going abroad to find work unrelated to their degrees, it may be easier to convince parents that the important thing in life is for their children to get jobs, not to get degrees. Why spend money on a college education when those without college degrees can earn more than college graduates? Compare what a call center employee without a college degree (more than P15,000/month) or a dog handler (P110,000/month) earns with what a clerk with a college degree makes. I rest my case.