International Enrollment up at CNC
Photo courtesy Anwen Goronwy-Roberts
Prince George, B.C. – The College of New Caledonia is proving to be a popular place for international students to study this year.
Anne Harris, Operations Manager for International Education at CNC says it shows in their enrollment numbers this semester.
“We’re still waiting for final numbers to come in but at the moment it looks like we’ll have around 310 in classes.”
She says that’s a nice bump from the 280 students they had last year and attributes it to a full intake in the Post Diploma and Information Technologies Program and extra scholarship students.
Harris says the students come from around the globe including China, India, Nigeria, Tanzania, Ghana, Brazil, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Russia.
Harris says the students are interested in studying at CNC for a variety of reasons.
“One thing we try to market overseas is our small class sizes which provides a lot of individual attention to students. They are also interested in the idea of being able to gain the first two years of university at a college like ours then transfer.”
And she says the benefits of having international students on campus goes beyond the extra tuition costs they pay.
“It gives our students the chance to meet people from all parts of the world.”
Comments
Yes the people with money taking over our community college. How many locals couldn’t get seats because of this?
NoWay —> The seat availability actually works the other way; locals get into programs and seats because the International students are enrolled at CNC. The International fees allows the college (or university) to offer additional sections of courses and additional programs beyond what the province funds. While the International fees pay for these additional sections, the International students do not utilize all of the seats. In addition, domestic students get priority registration and other provisions to insure the ‘locals’ have every opportunity to enroll.
All public educational institutions in BC including our grade schools rely on the International students tuition in order to maintain programming for ‘local’ students and to balance budgets.
Thanks for asking.
BC government, on average, pays around $10,000$ per year to BC colleges/universities for each BC student enrolled full time there, but not for enrolled international students.
The 10,000$ per student cost is the average paid to likes of SFU and Victoria. The amount paid to CNC/UNBC is higher. In the case of UNBC for example, government pays more than $17,000 per student(FTE), while it paid UNBC around $13,000 per student (FTE) 10 years ego. The TRU in Kamloops currently receives only $8000 per student from government which is half of UNBC.
This cost per student (i.e. cost per FTE) is a measure of effective management of resources by the academic institutions and the variation on the costs and reducing it (by better management or mergers) is “on the radar” of the BC opposition: cf “NVIT where they say they have significantly reduced their FTE cost to about $14k from $21k”.
Those institutions which cannot bring down their costs per student will not survive in this tough climate if the payment system is fixed. We have already seen some major changes in UNBC management in the past year to bring down its cost per student which was spiraling out of control. Better management with significant reduction of their FTE cost should become the focus.
Source: “Improving Deficiencies in BC Higher Education”, 14 pages. Sept 2013.
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