I Spent Two Years At Informatics Alabang – Here’s If It Was Actually Worth It
I’m waiting for the back of the Alabang-Zapote jeep right now, leaning against the same concrete gate I leaned against after every 7AM class for two years. The isaw vendor is still parked 10 feet away, the same guy who gave me free extra vinegar when I forgot my wallet once. The escalator leading up to the Informatics building is still broken, just like it was when I tripped over the loose tile by the entrance on my first day. That was 2021, I was 19, fresh out of high school, my mom had just gotten retrenched from her admin job at the mall, and I was scrambling for anything that wasn’t a four year degree I couldn’t pay for. Everyone I asked either said “yeah Informatics is fine for short courses” or “don’t waste your money there”. So I enrolled, and now people DM me on Facebook all the time asking the same question: is Informatics Alabang actually worth it?
Let me start with the part no one talks about when they advertise it. The tuition they post on the Facebook page is 14,800 a semester, right? That sounds cheap until you add the lab fee, the mandatory membership for the student org, the certification exam fee that’s another 5,000 out of pocket. Second semester I couldn’t come up with the certification fee, so I sold my old PS Vita and all my games to my classmate for 4,500 just to make up the difference. I didn’t tell my mom, because she was already borrowing money from her sister for our electric bill. The facilities are also exactly what you’d expect for that price: half the computers in the main lab crash if you have more than two tabs open. I still remember my midterm project for web design, I’d stayed up three nights building a mock bookstore site, and the computer blue screened 10 minutes before submission. I ran all the way down to the 7-Eleven across the street, my laptop bag slipping off my shoulder, crying a little because I thought I’d have to retake the whole class, and borrowed a chair from the cashier to reupload it from my Google Drive. It worked, but I left with smudged mascara and a 12 peso cold coffee I couldn’t really afford.
The best part of the whole thing was never the school itself, it was the people, if you get lucky. My core web dev instructor was this guy named Kuya Lito, who worked full time as a senior dev at a startup in Filinvest City and taught two classes a week for extra cash. He never read off the PowerPoints that the school gave him. Half the time we’d spend class going through actual bug tickets he brought from work, talking about how to argue with product managers that don’t know what they want, how to fix a payment gateway that keeps breaking at 2AM. He let me help him with a small side project for a local bakery, paid me 3,000 pesos for 10 hours of CSS work, that was the first money I ever made doing anything tech related. When I graduated, he was the one who referred me to my first job, not the school’s job placement office.
The school swears they guarantee 100% job placement, right? What that actually means is they’ll send you a link to a job fair that any random person can go to. The first job fair they sent me to was just 20 call center booths hiring for customer service, none of them cared that I had a diploma in web development. The second one was three small IT shops, but all of them wanted someone with 2 years experience already. I didn’t get a single interview from any of the leads the school gave me. All the connections I got were from Kuya Lito, and from the other classmates I studied with, all of us cramming for exams at the Jollibee outside after class.
I still think about the graduation showcase we had to do, where we presented our final projects to a panel of local business people. I built a whole e-commerce site for my mom’s friend’s plant shop, and one of the judges asked me to explain what a REST API was. I froze. The school had mentioned it once in passing, in a 10 minute slide at the end of the semester, I didn’t actually know how to explain it simply. I got a B instead of an A, and I was so mad I left right after and didn’t go to the group dinner everyone else went to. That’s the kind of thing that sticks with you, y’know? The gaps that the school just leaves for you to fill on your own. A lot of the curriculum is out of date – they were still teaching basic HTML like it was 2015 when I was there, and I had to learn React and all the stuff that actually got me hired on my own time, watching YouTube after class.
The thing is, no one asks if it’s worth it in a vacuum. You’re asking because you probably have the same options I had: you can’t afford a big private university, you didn’t get into the state university, you want to learn a skill that’ll get you a job faster than four years. If that’s you, let’s be real. It’s not a fancy degree. There’s no big campus, no org parties, no football games, none of that college experience people talk about. The biggest event the school had the whole two years I was there was a Christmas potluck where we all had to bring our own food. If you want that whole college vibe, you’ll hate every second here. If you need a flexible schedule because you’re working part time while you study, though? That’s one thing it does really well. I worked 20 hours a week at a milk tea shop near the station while I studied, and all my instructors were fine with me switching between morning and evening classes when my shift changed. Most of the other students are in the same boat, working while they study, so no one judges you for showing up to class tired.
I’m making 35k a month now as a junior dev at a small fintech here in Metro Manila. I pay half our house bills, I’m saving up to take an advanced certification later this year. If I hadn’t gone to Informatics Alabang, I’d probably be working at a call center right now, making less money, doing something I don’t care about. Was it worth it? I don’t know. If I’d gotten off the UP waitlist like I wanted, would I be better off? Maybe. But I didn’t, so this was the path I took. It wasn’t perfect. There were a dozen times I wanted to drop out, when the fees hit me out of nowhere, when the computer crashed, when I realized I had to learn everything important on my own. But it got me where I am. If you’re okay with the fact that you’re going to have to do a lot of the heavy lifting yourself, if you just need a foot in the door and a basic foundation that you can build on, then yeah, it’s worth it. If you’re expecting it to be a golden ticket that hands you a perfect job after two years, you’re going to leave disappointed. The jeep’s here, by the way. I gotta go. (Word count: ~1120)
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