Four-month summer holiday for UP students

INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines—Students of the country’s premier state university will be returning to school in August—after a four-month summer holiday.

The Diliman campus of the University of the Philippines (UP) is the latest in the UP university system to jump on the bandwagon favoring a change in the academic calendar to ostensibly align the Philippines’ education schedule with that of other countries in Southeast Asia.

After a year of deliberation, UP’s flagship campus joined seven other UP campuses that earlier announced their plans to make the change.

On Friday, the board of regents, the university’s highest decision-making body, formally approved by a unanimous vote the shift in Diliman’s academic calendar from the old June-to-May to the new August-to-July schedule.

It came after a meeting last Monday of the Diliman University Council, composed of professors and assistant professors, that supported the calendar shift by a vote of 284 to 164.

August-to-July schedule

This means all of UP’s constituent universities—UP Diliman, UP Manila, UP Los Baños, UP Baguio, UP Visayas, UP Mindanao, UP Open University and UP Cebu—will be adopting the August-to-July schedule, UP president Alfredo Pascual said in a statement.

“The decision to shift the academic calendar is part of the continuing efforts of UP to develop into a regional and global university, and to maximize the opportunities offered by integration and global educational partnerships,” he said.

A campus-wide referendum last February showed that 954 of 1,130 participating faculty favored the shift in the academic calendar.

Some UP Diliman students were not in favor of the change in the academic calendar because of the inconvenience to their summer plans.

It makes it harder to make travel plans during the new “summer vacation,” now set from June to July, said Janelle Lim, 20.

Too rainy for beach

“It will be difficult to make plans for the outdoors since those months are already rainy,” said Lim, an education major.

Wilmer Pedroso, a 17-year-old molecular biology and biotechnology student, said that even if his friends also go to schools that have made the shift, making plans for June and July would be difficult, as “it will be too rainy to go to the beach by then.”

Lemuel Teh, 17, said his scheduled community and church activities during the summer might be affected.

“I have church activities usually set during April and May. Since we still have classes at that time, I might have to forgo some of them,” said the business economics major.

Teh said students might just find the summer heat unbearable during the regular classes, which will extend into the summer months.

“It’s not conducive to learning at all,” he said.

Pilot basis

The UP colleges that supported the change included Law (100 percent), School of Labor and Industrial Relations (100 percent), Marine Science Institute (95 percent), Statistics (94 percent), Asian Institute of Tourism (91 percent), Human Kinetics (91 percent), Architecture (87 percent), Engineering (86 percent) and the National College of Public Administration and Governance (83 percent).

Diliman chancellor Michael Tan and the executive council will now be asked to draw up the new academic calendar, said Prospero de Vera, vice president for public affairs.

Under the new scheme, classes will open in August, with the first semester ending in December. Classes for the second semester will resume in January and end in May, while the “summer term” will be from June to July.

“The BOR (board of regents) approved the [shift] on a pilot basis, meaning all possible problems with the schedule in each constituent university must be threshed out by the next school year in 2015,” De Vera said.

UP, the University of Santo Tomas and Ateneo de Manila University were the first three to announce their intention to make a change in the school calendar.

The three, which have “autonomous” status, said they were doing so to prepare for the Asean Economic Community planned for 2015 and align their academic calendars with other major universities in the world.

The Philippines is apparently the only member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) that follows a June-to-March academic calendar. Other Asean countries, including Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and, most recently, Thailand, are already following the September-to-May school calendar.

Republic Act No. 7797 on the mandated school calendar provides that the school year should start “on the first Monday of June but not later than the last day of August.”

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