“For students conditioned to see the world in terms of efficiency and returns, even a short encounter with a different reality can open questions they were never taught to ask.”
A student once told me that before the service-learning project in our Corporate Social Responsibility and Governance class, she had never spoken to anyone who earned less than minimum wage. She had learned about poverty through statistics and case studies. She had memorized the Sustainable Development Goals for an exam. But she had never sat across a mother who makes soap by hand to keep her children in school.
That really stuck with me because it says a lot about what business education gets wrong.
We produce graduates who can come up with financial models and optimize supply chains, but who have never reconciled those models with the realities of communities their future companies will affect. Management scholar Sumantra Ghoshal warned about this two decades ago: business schools, in their obsession with technical competence, were teaching students to treat people as line items. This warning has not aged well.
Look at what is happening around us. Trillions of pesos meant for flood control projects ended up in ghost infrastructure and kickbacks, sparking the largest anti-corruption protests the country has seen in years. A senator even suggested that the Philippines simply give up the Kalayaan Island Group to make things easier. These are not only political controversies. They reflect failures of ethical reasoning from people who presumably received good education but somewhere along the way stopped asking who gets harmed by their decisions.
This was the backdrop to a study that my colleague Karol Castillo and I recently published in The International Journal of Management Education. We analyzed 575 student reflections collected over two academic years to understand how service-learning, the practice of embedding community engagement into coursework, develops what scholars call humanistic management competencies. These are the skills and dispositions that treat business not just as a vehicle for profit, but as a social institution accountable to human dignity.
The findings confirmed some of our expectations and challenged others.
The strongest outcomes were when students stepped out of the classroom and into direct contact with partner communities. Experiential learning and community partnerships turned out to be the most effective drivers of personal empowerment and ethical leadership. Students who co-designed livelihood workshops with community organizations experienced a genuine change in their perspective on business. One student wrote that, for the first time, they understood what it means to be a business leader who looks out for the welfare of people, and not just shareholders.
What surprised us, however, was reflective practice. It has long been considered the engine of transformative learning, but in our findings, it showed weak connections to outcomes. Students required to journal through the Lasallian Reflection Framework did not show the deep connections we anticipated between that reflection and their personal development. This does not mean that reflection is pointless. But it may mean that when reflection becomes a graded requirement, students approach it differently. Students write what they think the professor wants to read. The real processing might be happening elsewhere, in conversations after class, in group chat at midnight, in the commute home after meeting for the first time their partner community.
The Philippines continues to experience economic growth alongside significant inequality. SDG 8 calls for decent work and economic growth. SDG 12 demands responsible consumption and production. SDG 17 emphasizes partnerships. These goals will remain as decorative talking points in corporate presentations unless the people making business decisions have actually encountered the problems these goals are meant to address.
To be clear, service-learning is not a silver bullet. Our study is honest about its limitations. We heard only from students, and not from the communities they worked with. We collected reflections at the end of a course, not five years later, when those same students are already influencing decisions in organizations. We do not know if what students reported will hold up once they enter corporate life.
And yet, something happens when a business student works alongside a community member and realizes that textbook theories do not fully capture how that person lives. That experience may be brief. The community may not feel the benefit long after the semester ends. For students conditioned to see the world in terms of efficiency and returns, even a short encounter with a different reality can open questions they were never taught to ask.
Business education does not need a complete revolution. It simply requires more of those interactions.
Adrian A. Mabalay teaches Corporate Social Responsibility and Governance at the Department of Management and Organization of De La Salle University, which incorporates service-learning into its business curriculum. He can be reached at adrian.mabalay@dlsu.edu.ph.
The views expressed above are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official position of DLSU, its faculty, and its administrators.
