Enrolment in the fall semester is up four per cent from last year at the College of the Rockies, as students continue to flood into popular trades and university transfer programs.
The trend in increased enrolment is a trend that's continued from 2013, as numbers have grown ten and a half per cent since then.
Business Administration, Child, Youth and Family Studies, Tourism and Recreation Management and Kinesiology are areas that have seen the most significant growth, according to Jason Colombo, the COTR Registrar and Manager of Institutional Research.
Colombo also noted that the transfer system in B.C. makes it easy for students to complete some of their programs locally before finishing in other institutions.
"I would say every one of our academic, vocational and trades programs have transferability. If you look at trades, they're Red Seal trades, so they're inter-provincial and you can transfer your first-year apprenticeship to any institution in B.C. or across the country," Colombo said.
"As far as transferability with the health programs, again the mobility within British Columbia is one of the best in the world, definitely in Canada as far as the B.C. Transfer system goes."
A recent report by The British Columbia Council on Admission and Transfer (BCCAT), which looked at students who transferred to a degree-granting institution between 2008 and 2012, demonstrated a significant benefit of starting at College of the Rockies.
The report noted that students who started at COTR and transferred to another institution typically did better academically than their peers with a higher GPA. Additionally, 85 per cent of COTR students who've transferred have completed their degree—the highest completion rate of transfer students from any B.C. institution.
While trades, especially heavy-duty mechanics, remains popular, enrolment in other programs, such as the Child, Youth and Family Studies program has started to swell.
"Our CYFS programs are cohorted programs. We can admit a certain number of students every year and so we've been meeting our maximums on that. We try to have students take those programs on a full-time or full cohort basis, but many of our students are part-time learners and so the increase is due to two reasons. One—more of the students are taking a greater course load and we also received funding for additional seats for the Educational Assistant program," Colombo said.
College of the Rockies has also been ranked number one in the world in overall student satisfaction in the International Student Barometer, the largest annual survey of international students in the world, conducted by International Graduate Insight Group (i-graduate).
“The i-graduate survey results point out the outstanding learning and teaching environment created by our faculty and also the exceptional support from everyone at the College, from the front door to our superb online environment,” Colombo said.