ACLC College Students: An observation

By: Joey D. Bidan Jr.

The life of a school is its students. Whether it's public or private, whatever type of student management system the school implements, the goal should always be for the welfare of both the students and the school itself. Nevertheless, whichever school around the world you go into, there will always be common issues of complaints on how the school system works because there is no perfect system ever implemented yet for any school or for any other institution for that matter. We can never please both the conservative and the liberal observer of school policies. The bottomline here is how a balance of both matters could actually have great impact on how students will behave according to how such policies are implemented, whether the holistic environment will be conducive to their learning (and at the same time fair to them) or not.

I was asked to give an unprejudiced opinion on how ACLC students behave. It is only safe to say that I will have a fair judgment for this task because I spent relevant periods of time in three schools already (as a student), both public and private. As I see it so far, there are significantly varied differences in behavioral patterns of students in ACLC College compared to schools that I’ve been with - Eastern Visayas State University (a complex public school) and Saint Paul's School of Business and Law (a specialized private school).

If you will be asking any outsider and let them compare students in the schools we just mentioned, you will hear them say, (regardless of college departments or courses) "EVSU students look less anxious on their studies and seen as more concerned on having fun. SPSBL students look more anxious about their studies and seen as less concerned on having fun. ACLC students are...well...I don't see them a lot." We all know this is a biased opinion. It's a one-sided view with only a few bases. That is how 4 out of 5 out-of-school adults from Tacloban I asked, shared their views. How did they come up with this stereotypical perspective? The selected factors they just readily considered are: school popularity, student visibility, student prominence or notoriety and of course, school population.

Let's just assume that these outsiders' opinion is credible. The information we got from that first, were that EVSU students are just relaxed and happy go lucky. Why? Most probably because a high concentration of the EVSU population is widely distributed around Region 8 and a high proportion of them are at the state of eat-drink-and-be-merry attitudes. What about SPSBL students? They are mostly viewed as enthusiastic which is just an illusion due to their school's strict policy on Accounting subjects. SPSBL is specialized in accounting - a subject complimented as an intellectual endeavor (nosebleeding as they say, as if EVSU's Engineering maths were not). This school's population is lower but compared to EVSU, a high proportion of the students are commonly seen bragging fat calculators and plump accounting reviewers.

Enter ACLC. The College with students that could rarely be seen. A few friends would say the reason to that is "probably because they're too busy looking for jobs and getting themselves hired." I may not have statistical records of enrollees or charts and graphs but I am an irregular student and I'm mingling with other students who are under five major courses. My reason why it is safe to say that a high proportion of ACLC College students are just transferees is because I have an average of 12 transferee classmates out of 20 in each class who are under each of the major courses. Now in statistics, that is a reasonably reliable sample. These transferees are dropouts continuing their studies, working students, single parents, reformed "black sheep" and "school-hoppers" like me, who learned life's lessons and have little time to fool around and getting busy to graduate ASAP. Only a few remain still "swimming in mud" resuming their old ways of easily dropping subjects because basically, for normal persons if you are already stuck for more than five years in college you're reaction to it should be to end the shame and just finish the course for good.

So generally, like any other small-scale private schools ACLC is a last resort for most students getting dumped from more prestigious universities like EVSU, LNU and UP. To survive and to be able to expand, it needs to continue to open its arms to students seeking refuge from a world of high expectations. It can't afford to deny admissions or to stop giving chances or to discriminate shy loners and slow learners and undisciplined rich brats (pardon the redundancy). Let's just face it; this is not a bad thing because ACLC is gaining respect nationwide as a helping hand even giving assurance of a better job if you graduate. The law of "survival of the fittest" shouldn't apply here. Whether you call it becoming commercialized - tolerating, petting and spoonfeeding confused kids as long as they could pay, I say it's just being liberal. ACLC is just sticking to its nature as a consenting "second mother" picking up kids after they fall. It is entirely up to the students now to realize their own mistakes and reform themselves. Anyway as what Stephen Covey said, "They are not a product of their circumstances but a product of their decisions." No matter what the school policy is, no matter how many times we motivate or punish them if they continue to decide to be that way, so be it.

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