Good God. Who dreams up these idea’s.

1. UNBC is funded by BC Taxpayers, so why are we subsidizing tuition fee’s for students from other area’s.

2. This is nothing more than a vain effort by UNBC to increase their enrolments. In fact what they are doing is paying these people to attend UNBC. Pretty sad state of affairs.

3. If they are going to offer this incentive to the athletes how are they going to pay for it. Are they going to increase tuitions for regular students, and foreign students???

4. What incentive are they offering graduates from BC Schools to enroll at UNBC???

5. Lets hope UNBC keeps us informed as to the success of this program so that we can determine how much money it cost us.

Its time this University, and this town grew up and started to run things in a sane and sensible manner, and forget about all the gobbly gook.

The vice provost of student engagement in UNBC is William Owen from Psychology program. He was the last acting dean of student engagement and student ‘enrollment’ for a year until June 2013 when ‘enrollment’ was dropped from the name of the position and it became a vice provost position.

The enrollment dean position was created in 2005 after a proposal by the last DTO chair in UNBC and the urgent need for a position reporting to provost to reduce the long processing times for UNBC applications from few months to few days in UNBC. The UNBC registrar was subsequently replaced and Paul Madak became the first Dean of enrollment (and student engagement) for a 5 year period and he was replaced after asking for removal of McNamara.

Who is in charge of Enrollment in UNBC now? I would say the office of registrar.

DTO = Double The Opportunities

This is a recruiting effort with a very narrow audience. I’d much rather see taxpayer funds spent on improving education, not attracting athletes.

I assume that these athlete tuition credit comes from the government funding for unrealized seats in UNBC which are now equivalent to 600-700 empty seats in non-existing programs (e.g. engineering) in UNBC ($9 Million+ annually).

I say non existing engineering programs, because the original DTO funding target was for creating 250 student seats (FTE) in Engineering programs (e.g. electrical Eng.) in UNBC and not a single seat in engineering was created in UNBC over the last decade. The ir-responsible dean of CSAM college in UNBC never allocated a DTO line in the budget of his college and it is not clear where the several Million Dollars of funding annually has been disappearing in UNBC since 2002. See DTO target lines in UNBC budget reports (e.g. 2003-2007 period).

You wanna look desperate?
Start giving away your services at reduced rates.
Nobody wins.

Hey guys .. lighten up .. funding athletes with sports scholarships/grants/etc. is a way of recruiting students across North America. With a proven return at many institutions. UNBC has one of the best cross county skiing / biathlon training setups in North America.

Take a look at this link regarding the use of your tax dollars. The quick facts listed below is an excerpt from the link.

http://www.newsroom.gov.bc.ca/2013/11/new-money-paves-way-for-prince-george-canada-winter-games.html

Quick Facts:

The Government of British Columbia has provided $11.12 million in funding to the 2015 Canada Winter Games, an amount that has been matched by the federal government.

Have a great evening while you consider $22+ million of yours floating around town.

So….does UNBC have a squash team ? Badminton team ? Hockey team ? Curling team ? Ski team ? What “elite athletes” is this program targeting ?

I’m not sure why most of you are up in arms. If you think about it, the chances of an elite athlete choosing to go to UNBC are pretty much slim to none unless they were born and raised here. If they get more then two people taking them up on this offer I’d be very surprised.

Why the people in charge of the enrollment position in UNBC were not successful?

Paul Madak (with work in Education) was in charge of enrollment position for too long without showing much improvement in FTE numbers, although he improved the application processing system following the findings of the bottlenecks in the system in the 27 pages of DTO report that DTO chair wrote. But Madak didn’t manage to find new bottlenecks after fixing those and to offer new solutions. Madak’s replacement was hired from outside UNBC and she was not familiar with UNBC culture and a student hiring manager (with not much analytical or engineering skills) and her replacement is now Owen.

William Owen (the guy in far left corner of picture with eye glasses) has also struggled in the position. What was Owen’s experience in enrollments? He has analytical skills but he has no engineering background like his predecessors in the position to create the needed unrealized empty seats in UNBC (40% are due to Engineering). He suffers from lack of international links as all his predecessors and also lack of experience in enrollment management and not very open to international opportunities (e.g. in Asia).

The position is not an easy job that you delegate to ‘a friend’ because it will give ‘a black eye’ to the career if it is not skillfully managed. The solution may be sitting in UNBC file of applicants for the position of dean of enrollment, but the solution is not in eliminating the enrollment position reporting to provost that Mark Dale took out of frustration.

Not up in arms at all. I was hoping someone could tell me if UNBC has a team or program for any of the (19 is it ?)sports that are the Canada Winter Games ? Target shooting ? Sync swimming ? I agree with what you posted axman.

I think it’s a great idea. Possibly a good way to attract students to UNBC and who knows, maybe they will stay here.