A scholarship can cover tuition. It cannot necessarily cover lunch, the commute to school, or the other daily expenses that can make staying in college a financial juggling act.
That is the gap Isidro Consunji wants to fill.
The 77-year-old civil engineering graduate of the University of the Philippines, and chairman, president, and executive director of DMCI Holdings Inc., is exploring a hybrid scholarship and endowment fund that would lend money to intellectually gifted but financially challenged students. The fund would cover not just school fees but the less obvious costs of getting through college.
Consunji tentatively calls it a “study-now-pay-later” program. What he has in mind goes beyond tuition. Scholars could use the money for meals, transportation, and other necessities conventional scholarships may leave out.
He drew the broad strokes of the idea over dinner with journalists after visiting a new nickel mine site in Aborlan, Palawan. The fund, he said, would be separate from the Consunji family foundation and devoted exclusively to scholarships.
There is also a little autobiography behind the idea.
Consunji spent several years in the 1960s at a traditional boarding school in Australia before transferring to Ateneo de Manila University, which at the time was an all-boys school. Then he saw the UP Oval, where, in his telling, pretty girls in miniskirts were everywhere.
That apparently made the case for transferring. The eldest son of businessman David Consunji told his father he wanted to follow in his footsteps by studying engineering at UP. His father agreed.
Academic motivation took longer.
His father eventually told him to start working. Consunji took a P6-a-day job in the family business’s motorpool. Saturday was payday. By Tuesday evening, he was broke, his wages gone to cigarettes and alcohol.
The experience taught him a hard lesson about the value of education.
He returned to UP, finished civil engineering and passed the board examination in the early 1970s. He later enrolled at the Asian Institute of Management, made the Dean’s List, then got bored. After learning students could fail three subjects and still pass, he picked three. He ultimately failed five after unexpected extra classes spoiled the plan.
The student who once needed a push to take school seriously was named UP’s Most Outstanding Alumnus in 2024. In 2022, the Management Association of the Philippines named him Man of the Year, following his father, David, in 1996.
His experience helps explain his focus on costs beyond tuition. Food, fares, and other modest expenses can become serious distractions for poor students.
But loans bring their own risks. Repayments can follow graduates into working life, while defaults can drain the fund. Consunji is still figuring out how to minimize those risks.
His plan is an endowment that replenishes itself. Friends would be asked to contribute once, with the capital invested to support successive scholars. Students would repay under terms designed to keep defaults low and the fund circulating.
He wants the program eventually to reach students across almost every discipline that contributes to the growth the economy, that builds on his dream of a better Philippines.
