The longest strike in the 50-year history of Ontario colleges has not led to mass withdrawals, at least not at Canadore College.
Shawn Chorney, Vice President at Canadore College got the numbers today as the drop out deadline was Monday, December 4th.
“At the end of the day yesterday for the fall 2017 semester we had 125 students withdraw from full-time programming here at the college,” stated Chorney.
He says out of that 125, a total of 53 students plan on returning in January of 2018 to start their program over.
“We have a number of programs starting in January, semester one,” explained Chorney.
“The withdrawal is temporary for those ones, and normally in a regular fall semester without a strike or disruption to the extent we have had, we would expect between 40 and 60 students to withdraw from the college on a normal semester due to finding work, starting a family, or changing their career plans.
“So right now at the college, we are seeing about 30 to 35 extra withdrawals from the fall semester that we can directly attribute to the strike.”
Chorney believes Canadore College fared very well considering the length of the strike.
See: 1,100 Georgian College students drop out following faculty strike
“We have had some informal discussions but right now I can honestly tell you it seems as though we are going to retain more of our students who are registered with us than most. You know, pound for pound we are performing a little bit better that way,” he said.
“It is certainly not as bad as it could have been, let me put it that way.”
Chorney says the school is working hard at implementing more help for students moving forward which includes more availability of tutors and the extension of lab hours going until the end of April.
“We are working with every single one of them to try and find opportunities for them to either come back next fall or to transfer some of their work that they have done here to their home institution if they are from another community where there is another college,” he said.
“Our major goal as a student success team throughout all of this during, before and after the strike is really to fulfill to what we said to the students we would do and that’s get the career job that they want.”
