More Canadian colleges are turning into universities
- Oliver Lui
- Jul 21, 2018
- 2 min read
Many local Canadians teenagers have been missing out on taking their education further because universities are located far away from their hometowns. In response to this, a recent trend among Canadian colleges is that they are slowly transitioning into universities.
On February 22, Minister of Advanced Education Marlin Schmidt announced that Grande Prairie Regional College (GPRC) had been approved for degree-granting status, with a view to becoming a university. On March 1, Premier Rachel Notley appeared at an event to announce that Red Deer College (RDC) also had been approved to grant its own degrees. That same day, the education minister again went before the cameras to confirm that the Alberta College of Art + Design (ACAD) had achieved university status.
The college-to-university transition is a recurring phenomenon in Canada. Two other Alberta colleges made a similar transition less than a decade ago, while British Columbia saw five post-secondary institutions (three university-colleges and two colleges) become universities back in 2008.
Like Red Deer, the City of Grande Prairie and its surrounding region, some 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton, has experienced an exodus of residents seeking university-level education.
In Calgary, ACAD has been granting degrees for more than 20 years and recently graduated its first cohort of master’s students. The institution has essentially operated as a university in all but name for decades.
The Yukon government approved Yukon College’s request to grant degrees and change its name after more than 40 years of lobbying all levels of government. The plan is to fully transition to Yukon University by 2020. The team at Yukon College wants a new kind of system, one that suits a “hybrid university” with a range of trades, vocational, degree, postgraduate and applied research programs
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