The UP College of Home Economics (CHE) was founded on July 27, 1961. However, the institutional appreciation of the value of home economics as a discipline and an area of study in UP can be traced to 1921 when the University Council approved the degree programs Bachelor of Science in Home Economics and Bachelor of Science in Education, major in home economics. 

Early this century when home economics came into being as a profession in United States, one of its first leaders, Ellen Richards, summarized the discipline during the 1902 Lake Placid Conference as, “…in its most comprehensive sense, the study of the laws, conditions, principles and ideals which are concerned on the one hand with man’s immediate physical environment and on the other hand with his nature as a social being, and the relation between two factors” (East, 1980). It was in the same conference where the home and family as focus of home economics was established.

In the Philippines in 1990, the UP College of Home Economics faculty collectively defined home economics as “the study of families and the management of resources available to them for the satisfaction of their basic needs in changing environments.” 

Indeed, many disciplines serve the needs of families and consumers but perhaps none has a longer tradition and more central and broader interest than home economics. 

Taken from 
Families and Home Economics Monograph Series No. 2 – The College of Home Economics at the University of the Philippines: What It Was, What It Is, What It Wants To Be and the Process of Becoming (1995)
by Cecilia A. Florencio