UNIVERSITY Rector Fr. Herminio Dagohoy, O.P. led the groundbreaking rites of UST’s satellite campus in General Santos City in Mindanao on Friday.
UST GenSan will be an 80-hectare campus, four times the size of UST Manila, in the villages of Ligaya and Katangawan.
Dagohoy said the new satellite campus would offer affordable education, following standard educational fees in Mindanao.
“We could not actually make education very expensive in this part of the country. Precisely our mission is to provide affordable education in Mindanao,” Dagohoy told reporters during the event.
The new UST campus is expected to rise by 2020 and the academic year will officially open in 2021.
Dagohoy added that the Mindanao campus will initially offer programs in business and accountancy, arts and humanities, engineering and technology, and pharmaceutical sciences.
General Santos City is the “best” place to attain Mindanao’s vision in terms of development, he said.
“We have actually read and studied the development program of Mindanao. [The city] is not developed [unlike] other cities in Mindanao. I think the possibilities, the opportunities are broader here in GenSan,” he said.
General Santos City Mayor Ronnel Rivera said the presence of UST would turn the city into an educational hub and place it on the “radar” of potential investors.
“UST’s presence here [is] a manifestation na papunta tayo sa dream natin, sa vision natin na maging university hub ang ating city. Pag sinabing university hub more development will come, more investors [too],” Rivera told the Varsitarian in an interview.
The University bought the land for P96 million in 1997, but city officials initially opposed the project.
The city council under Rivera approved the re-zoning of the property to institutional from agricultural on Oct. 8, 2013 through City Ordinance 15 series of 2013.
The Department of Agrarian Reform first approved the conversion of the land in 2003.
The University’s integration plan with other Dominican schools in the country and the construction of satellite campuses in Santa Rosa and General Santos City in Mindanao were first unveiled by Dagohoy in his 2015 Rector’s Report.
The University moved forward with its expansion in 2017, integrating with Angelicum College and Aquinas University of Legazpi, now UST Angelicum and UST Legazpi, respectively.
Dagohoy led the groundbreaking rites of UST Santa Rosa in Laguna in September of last year, the first satellite campus of the University outside Metro Manila.
READ: Rector leads groundbreaking of new UST campus in Laguna
