NSCC gets money for more students

NS: NSCC gets $2M to target programs and skills in high demand
By Philip Croucher, Metro Halifax

Source: Metro Halifax, April 14, 2010

[HALIFAX, NS] — Joan McArthur-Blair refers to it as a beginning step.

The president of the Nova Scotia Community College was on hand at the school’s Institute of Technology campus in north-end Halifax yesterday as Premier Darrell Dexter announced his government was adding 250 spaces for students at NSCC campuses across the province at a cost of $2 million.

“We have about 2,500 Nova Scotians currently on our wait list — and so this is incremental,” McArthur-Blair said after the noontime announcement. “It’s a beginning to look at the ways in which we dissolve that wait list and how we understand about getting more and more Nova Scotians into the college.”

No definitive decision has been made on where the new spaces for students will go, but McArthur-Blair said it would be for “high-demand areas” of employment.

She said those fields include the health sector, human-service areas, and trades and technology.

To help bring this point home, yesterday’s announcement attended by Dexter and Education Minister Marilyn More took place inside an IT classroom for the electronic engineer technicians program.

“It’s really targeted programming at those high-demand areas where this is both the student demand and the employer demand,” McArthur-Blair said.”