Camosun College has entered into a partnership with a college in the Philippines that will allow students at both colleges to study at each other’s campuses starting later this year.
The partnership is believed to be one of the first of its kind between post-secondary institutions in the two countries.
The delivery of Camosun programs at Miriam College — a women’s college in Quezon City with about 5,000 students — was announced at a news conference in Quezon City with Camosun president Lane Trotter and Miriam president Ambassador Laura. “We’re very excited to be bringing Camosun programs to the world, with Miriam College,” said Trotter.
The collaboration means students in the Philippines can start their Canadian educational studies closer to home, while giving Canadian students the option to complete some of the studies overseas, he said.
Miriam College is building a co-ed campus where the new programming will eventually be delivered.
Camosun is home to about 10,000 students.
The joint educational programming is part of a five-year partnership agreement that was signed by the colleges Oct. 5, and will see both student and faculty exchanges. While students will flow both ways in the partnership, there will likely be more Filipinos coming here than the other way around, said Geoff Wilmshurst, Camosun’s vice-president of partnerships.
He said the connection with the Philippines dates back to 2018, when he and Camosun’s then-president Sherri Bell were encouraged by the Canadian Bureau for International Education to go to the Philippines to meet with potential post-secondary partners.
In part, that’s because the Philippines has become one of the top sources of international students in Canada, Wilmshurst said. It’s also a country where English is the primary language of learning, he said.
“Most people, certainly in the middle class, speak English very fluently,” Wilmshurst said. “So it’s an easy place for Canadian institutions to be able to work.”
He and Bell did a tour of a number of schools in and around the capital city of Manila and on some of the islands south of Manila, he said.
“And Miriam College turned out to be the one that we felt like we had the most in common with and where we thought a partnership could happen.”
Both schools believe in hands-on learning and small classes that lead to close relationships between faculty and students, Wilmshurst said. He said it’s important for Camosun to recruit students from a variety of places, “so that we insulate ourselves from shocks like COVID where, for example, an entire country like China decides its students can’t leave.”
While Camosun is among many post-secondary institutions where enrolment has declined due to COVID and other factors, the number of international students is on the rise, although it’s still not back to pre-pandemic levels.
Overall enrolment this past fall was down about four per cent from 2021.
In 2021-22, Camosun College had 1,700 international students from just over 70 countries, which made it one of the most internationally diverse colleges in Canada.
Miriam College is a Catholic institution founded by the Maryknoll Sisters of New York in 1926.
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