‘Big four’ universities to start school in August

The country’s top universities aren’t partaking just yet in the annual hurly-burly usually accompanying the opening of classes in June.

This is because for school year 2015-2016, University of the Philippines (UP), Ateneo de Manila University (AdMU), De La Salle University (DLSU) and University of Santo Tomas (UST) will open classes in August.

UP already led the change last school year, when the school’s board of regents approved the shift of the academic calendar to August to July from the previous June to May. UST also implemented a transitional calendar which moved the start of their collegiate school year from June to July.

This year, AdMU, De la Salle University and UST will start implementing a calendar that begins in August, with AdMU Loyola Schools’ academic year to span from Aug. 10 to May 21, 2016; DLSU’s from Aug. 24 to Aug. 11, 2016, and UST from August to May.

For AdMU, the calendar shift is the first step in the school’s “internationalization initiatives,” said Teresa Ricafort Santos, AdMU assistant to the vice president for university and global relations office.

“More and more, there’s a need to prepare our students for an increasingly interconnected world … to try to develop global outlook and competencies,” Santos said, in an interview with the Inquirer on Tuesday.

“To increase the quality and intensity of our engagements with universities overseas, we need to synchronize our schedule with theirs. [This calendar shift] aligns us with at least 70 percent of universities worldwide,” Santos said.

“We’re already beginning to feel the benefits: There’s been a tremendous increase in inbound exchange students [this school year],” Santos said.

Meanwhile, in a December 2013 memo announcing the DLSU’s calendar shift this school year, DLSU president Ricardo Laguda explained the calendar shift was borne from “the Asean Economic Community 2015 and the Asean University Network (AUN) [encouraging]  its member universities to align their country’s academic calendar with the rest of their international partner academic institutions.”

Santos admitted that during the yearlong consultations before implementing the calendar shift, there were stakeholders who expressed reservations.

“One of the more popular concerns was the heat. Students and teachers have expressed concern about the fact that they would have to study and teach during the hottest times of the year,” Santos recalled.

“Another concern was that basic education and Ateneo college would be misaligned. Parents worry that if they had a child in basic education, and another in college, their breaks would be different,” Santos said.

“But we feel that the benefits attached to shifting academic calendar far outweigh the disadvantages brought on by the misalignment,” Santos said.

“The new academic calendar is seen to have numerous advantages, such as facilitating work-life harmony of the academic community with longer term breaks, improving administrative work, maintaining school facilities to its optimal level, reducing operational expenses, and providing better flexibility in case of class cancellations,” Laguda had said in the DLSU school memo. With Deany Cheng/RC