University of Eastern Pangasinan

The University of Eastern Pangasinan in Binalonan was founded in 2005 through a public-private partnership led by the then mayor and later provincial governor Ramon Guico III. It was the first university in Binalonan and is among a small number in the region to have grown out of a local government initiative rather than a national charter or a private foundation. The university sits in Barangay Canarvacanan at the centre of the municipality. Its main tower, inaugurated in 2012, accommodates up to 3,000 students and houses departments including criminology, hospitality and management, business administration, elementary and secondary education, midwifery and information technology. That programme mix is characteristic of locally founded institutions, which tend to concentrate on fields with direct local employment demand rather than on research-heavy disciplines. Binalonan sits on the main road between Urdaneta and the approach to Baguio, which gives the university a catchment reaching across eastern Pangasinan rather than only the municipality itself. It shares that corridor with Urdaneta City University and with campuses of Pangasinan State University, so eastern Pangasinan carries an unusually dense concentration of publicly funded higher education for a rural province.