Willam Dar is again the head of the Department of Agriculture. He is now one of the top officials of the land. He graduated from the Benguet State University and also took his master’s degree there. He got his PhD from the UP at Los Banos.
This should change the perception of many Cordillerans on agricultural courses. These are science courses so they require some brains. If you have a two-digit IQ, it will not do.
Yet we do not see the Cordillera’s best and the brightest trooping to the BSU. They are somewhere else taking other courses even with the fact that BSU, under the leadership of its President Roger Colting some years back, became a center of excellence.
It is just that people around don’t appreciate the fact that good agriculture graduates are highly employable and are paid very well. There are even a lot of post graduate academic opportunities abroad for those who finished in respected universities. For those who get to finish their master’s and doctorate, they don’t have to look for jobs. Good jobs are looking for them.
Perhaps one of the ways to entice intelligent Cordillerans to enroll in agricultural courses at BSU is for it to launch a relentless campaign for people to realize that there are glamour, prestige and high paying jobs here and abroad waiting for them after graduating from that university.
For those who could not be accommodated by BSU there are other respected agricultural universities not too far away. One of them is the Central Luzon State University (CLSU) found in Munoz, Nueva Ecija. It is just about two hours away from Baguio. Being a state university, admission is not a walk in the park for there are so many applicants. As to their facilities, they are supposed to be very good. It also has a wide campus, more than 700 hectares, and not full of squatters like BSU’s.
For those who can afford a private education, there is the De La Salle Araneta University in Malabon, Metro Manila. It used to be Araneta University Foundation but in 2002, it started riding on whatever prestige of exclusive De La Salle University.
On top of the totem pole of course is internationally recognized UP at Los Banos with a campus of almost a thousand hectares. Its College of Agriculture and College of Forestry were recently rated to belong to the top 100 colleges or universities in the world. Its facilities are world class.
A final caveat. For one to graduate from a good agricultural university, one must be good in mathematics, chemistry and in the other natural sciences.**