Andres Bonifacio College publishes an unusually wide programme list for a private college in a city of Dipolog's size: law, nursing, agriculture, social work, six engineering degrees and a graduate school, all from one campus. The problem is that its website is currently unreachable, so every figure and requirement below needs confirming by phone before you act on it.
Andres Bonifacio College is the largest private tertiary institution in Dipolog City by programme count, and its range is genuinely unusual for Northwestern Mindanao. Most private colleges that size run business, education and IT and stop there. ABC runs a law school and a nursing programme as well.
Contact details and the profile are on our Andres Bonifacio College page, and other options nearby are on our schools in Dipolog listing.
First, about the website
The college's domain, abcollege.edu.ph, does not currently serve its site. Over HTTPS it returns a 404 with a TLS certificate belonging to a hosting provider rather than the school. Over HTTP the www version returns a generic hosting error message. Archived copies show the domain serving a suspended-account page from around September 2024.
That is not proof the college has problems. Lapsed hosting is common and says nothing about a school's operations. But it does mean nothing below can be verified against a live source today. The programme list here comes from the last full copy of the college's own course catalogue, captured in August 2024, and the history from its own About page. Treat it as a starting point for questions, not as a current prospectus.
The published programme list
Graduate programmes
- Master in Public Administration (MPA)
- Master in Business Administration (MBA)
- Master of Arts in Educational Management (MAEM)
- Master of Arts, with majors in English and Literature, Elementary Education, Filipino, and Social Studies
A graduate school of that size in a provincial private college usually exists to serve local teachers and public servants pursuing promotion, and the major list here fits that pattern exactly.
Law
- Juris Doctor, listed on the page as Bachelor of Laws
The college's headline archive includes a post about its 2017 bar passers, so the law school has been producing candidates for some time. Anyone considering it should ask directly for recent bar passing figures rather than working from an old page.
Arts and Science
- Bachelor of Arts in Political Science (BAPS)
- Bachelor of Arts, with majors in English and Literature, Communication, and Physical Education
- Bachelor of Science major in Mathematics
- Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (BSCS)
- Bachelor of Science in Social Work (BSSW)
BS Social Work is the one to flag. It leads to the Social Worker licensure examination, which many people do not realise is a board course at all. Our BS Social Work guide explains the licensure route and where social work graduates actually end up.
Education
- Bachelor of Elementary Education
- Bachelor of Secondary Education, with majors in English, General Science, Mathematics, Filipino, and Social Studies
Five BSEd majors is a broad offering. Both degrees lead to the Licensure Examination for Teachers. Our BEEd guide covers what the elementary qualification licenses you to teach.
Engineering
- BS Geodetic Engineering
- BS Civil Engineering, with majors in Construction Engineering and Management, and in Structural Engineering
- BS Mechanical Engineering
- BS Electrical Engineering
- BS Computer Engineering
- BS Electronics Engineering
Every one of these except computer engineering leads to a PRC licensure exam. BS Geodetic Engineering is the rarest of the set nationally and its board exam is small enough that individual school results swing hard year to year. Our BS Geodetic Engineering guide covers what geodetic engineers do and why the degree is scarce.
The college published a downloadable prospectus for each engineering programme, which is the right document to ask for. A prospectus tells you the actual subject sequence and total units, which is what determines whether you can finish in four years.
Business and Management Education
- BS Accountancy
- BS Business Administration, with majors in Financial Management and Human Resource Development Management
- BS Office Administration
BS Accountancy is a board course and the rest are not. Our BS Office Administration guide covers where that degree leads, since it is frequently confused with business administration.
Criminology
- BS Criminology, with a published prospectus
Nursing
- BS Nursing, with a published prospectus
Nursing is capital-intensive to run properly, requiring skills laboratories and hospital affiliations. The college's own About page describes a five-storey Science and Technology Building housing biology, chemistry, physics, speech, computer, nursing skills and engineering laboratories, which is at least consistent with the claim. Ask to see the nursing skills laboratory on a campus visit and ask which hospitals the programme is affiliated with for related learning experience.
Agriculture
- BS Agriculture, under a School of Agriculture
What the college says about itself
The About page is worth reading for one reason: it is unusually specific about the school's founding, and specificity is a decent proxy for honesty.
Amando Borja Amatong, the son of a fisherman and farmer from Dalaguete, Cebu, finished his secondary education as a government pensionado at the Philippine Normal School, taught in Carcar and later in Manicahan, Zamboanga City, earned a Bachelor of Commerce from Jose Rizal College, and became School Supervisor for the Dipolog and Katipunan districts. He founded the Andres Bonifacio Institute in 1940 and died on 22 April 1943.
His widow, Felicidad Mabanag Sybico, reopened the institute with loans from relatives and ran it while raising eight children. The 1986 Outstanding Mother citation from the National Federation of Women's Clubs of the Philippines, quoted in full on the page, is about that.
The college now claims over 55 degree and diploma programmes and more than 20,000 alumni, and lists a Center for Governance Development and Continuing Studies (GODECOST) and the Amando B. Amatong Civic Center, which houses FM station DXAA 92.5.
The gap between "over 55 programmes" and the roughly 30 named degrees in the catalogue is not necessarily a contradiction; counting each major and each vocational offering separately gets you there. But it is the sort of number to check rather than repeat.
What to verify before you enrol
Because nothing here is currently live, treat the following as a call list:
- Is the programme still running this year? Course catalogues outlive the programmes on them. Ask specifically whether there is a first-year intake.
- Tuition. The college does not publish tuition figures anywhere we could find, live or archived. There is no published price for any programme. Ask for a written schedule of fees per semester, including laboratory and miscellaneous fees, not a single tuition number.
- Government recognition status. Ask for the CHED programme recognition or government permit status of the specific degree you want, particularly for nursing, law and the engineering programmes.
- Board passing rates for your programme. Ask for the last three years, first-time takers, not the overall figure.
- Basic education. Our record lists kindergarten through senior high school, but the published catalogue covers tertiary only. Confirm the levels and the senior high strands.
How the range compares locally
For context on why the breadth matters: Dipolog is a city of roughly 130,000 people, and a private college there carrying law, nursing, agriculture, social work and six engineering degrees is doing something most provincial private colleges do not attempt. The nearest alternatives with comparable coverage are in Dapitan and Ozamiz, or further out in Cagayan de Oro and Zamboanga City.
That breadth cuts both ways. A school offering thirty degrees on one campus is spreading faculty, laboratories and library budget across thirty programmes. The right question is not whether the programme exists but whether it is resourced: how many full-time faculty teach it, how many hold the master's or doctoral degree CHED expects, and what the laboratory and clinical arrangements are. Ask those about the specific programme you want, not about the college.
The reviews question
Public Google reviews for the school are mixed and several of the negative ones, mostly from basic education students, are strongly worded about discipline, teaching quality and fines. Reviews are not evidence in the way a passing rate is, and unhappy students write more reviews than happy ones. But if you are enrolling a child in the basic education department rather than in college, the specific complaints about fines and class suspension policy are cheap to ask about directly, and the answers will tell you something.
Our guide on private versus public school in the Philippines covers the trade-offs more generally.
Sources
- Andres Bonifacio College, Course Catalogue (archived copy of abcollege.edu.ph/courses-offered/, captured 18 August 2024)
- Andres Bonifacio College, About ABCollege (archived copy of abcollege.edu.ph/about-abcollege/, captured 26 July 2024)
- Live reachability of abcollege.edu.ph and www.abcollege.edu.ph, checked with a standard browser user agent
