iPeople, the listed Yuchengco-Ayala education joint venture, is pursuing an expansion strategy built around international partnerships, new campuses and facilities, sustainability-focused programs, and deeper artificial intelligence integration as it aims to nearly triple its student population to 200,000.
“Our goal is to deliver accessible, quality education to as many Filipinos as possible. To do this, we aspire to be one of the biggest and best-performing education systems in the country,” said iPeople President Fred Ayala. “We define best-performing by our graduates’ outcomes, their employability, board exam performance, and lifelong success. It’s not just about enrollment and institutional rankings.”
The education group, formed through the 2019 merger of the Yuchengco-led Mapúa schools and Ayala-backed education institutions under iPeople, has grown from about 50,000 students before the merger to more than 80,000 today, spanning kindergarten through doctoral programs. Ayala said higher education enrollment has doubled from pre-pandemic levels, supported by strong demand for technology-driven learning.
Expansion is underway across the group. The University of Nueva Caceres has broken ground on a new academic building at its five-hectare Naga City campus. National Teachers College is developing a new campus in Altaraza, San Jose del Monte, Bulacan, while Mapúa Malayan Colleges Laguna is constructing another academic facility at its Cabuyao campus. The group is also expanding its fully online Mapúa Malayan Digital College, which primarily serves working professionals pursuing business and information technology programs.
Beyond physical expansion, Ayala said the group is investing heavily in future-ready education. A new Green College, targeted for launch soon within the Mapúa Education Group (MEG), will offer sustainability specializations across disciplines rather than standalone degrees.
“Everybody in every degree needs to understand sustainability, and everybody needs to be AI-fluent,” Ayala said.
Artificial intelligence is now being embedded across MEG’s academic programs, complementing Mapúa’s Bachelor of Science in Artificial Intelligence, which was the first such program in the country. Rather than limiting AI to specialists, the group wants every graduate to achieve what Ayala described as “AI fluency,” or the ability to apply AI effectively in everyday professional work.
The strategy is reinforced by MEG’s expanded partnership with Arizona State University (ASU), which now covers all Mapúa programs after initially focusing on business and health sciences. The partnership is the first and only comprehensive academic collaboration between a leading Philippine education group and a top-ranked global university.
Mapúa University is ranked No. 1 in the Philippines by Times Higher Education in engineering, computer sciences, physical sciences, and social sciences, and is among the top 6 percent of universities globally. ASU is ranked No. 1 in the United States for innovation, impact, and sustainability.
Through the collaboration, all MEG higher education students gain access to ASU’s curriculum, global classrooms, research opportunities, and exchange programs across more than 30 partner universities worldwide, while paying Philippine tuition rates.
iPeople has also become the third-largest university partner globally of Coursera, one of the world’s largest online education and skills platforms, with about 45,000 licenses. These give all iPeople higher education students access to industry microcredentials and courses developed by leading universities and technology companies, including Google and IBM, as well as AI tutors and tools.
“Our vision is to build the future by unlocking every learner’s full potential,” Ayala said. “We seek to bring high-quality global education to the Philippines at scale.”
