A matter of degree

Helena Bryan | Image: Jupiter | Published: April 01, 2008

In a solemn ceremony on November 15, 2007, before an audience of close to 350 freshly minted Sprott-Shaw Community College grads and their families, former Newfoundland premier Brian Peckford took to the stage of the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts to be installed as Sprott-Shaw’s first chancellor.

The pipes were played, the national anthem was sung and vows were taken as a host of dignitaries looked on. Customarily reserved for universities, the tradition goes back as far as 1214, when the first chancellor was appointed at Britain’s University of Oxford, purportedly the oldest university in the English-speaking world.

Behind all the polite ceremony and tradition-steeped rituals, however, Peckford’s installation as chancellor is the latest salvo in a battle that’s been brewing since the B.C. government started allowing private colleges to grant degrees in 2003. It’s a skirmish involving more than two sides.

There are the legitimate private, for-profit schools such as Sprott-Shaw that want to hang on to the right to run degree programs. There are groups such as the Canadian Federation of Students, whose leaders believe public universities should have exclusive degree-granting authority, and the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of B.C. (CUFA), which is calling for tighter controls. And there are the unscrupulous profiteers masquerading as valid schools.

Not surprisingly, there’s a good deal at stake: the reputation abroad of a made-in-B.C. business degree, for one; the interests of both local and international students, who are playing an increasingly prominent role in Canada’s MBA programs, for another; and a piece of the growing – and highly lucrative – knowledge market. To give an idea of just how big the haul is,
according to a study by Roslyn Kunin and Associates Inc., the money generated by international students alone at just two of B.C.’s post-secondary schools in 2006 – SFU and Vancouver Community College – amounted to a whopping $90 million.

The B.C. Liberal government originally decided to allow private, for-profit colleges to offer degree programs as a way of increasing access to higher education, particularly business programs. Every year SFU turns away 70 per cent of applicants to its business undergrad degree programs, according to Carolyne Smart, who served as dean until September 2007. “We’re almost in the business of rationing,” she says. “To get into the business program, you have to have close to a 90 per cent average, compared to a 70 per cent average

for other programs. There’s a heck of a lot of students out there with 70 per cent averages who are good students and would make good employees.”

Smart sat on the academic panel, along with two other university professors, that approved Sprott-Shaw’s business-degree curriculum. It’s worth noting that all the degree programs offered by private colleges must first meet certain academic and organizational standards as measured by the provincial government’s Degree Quality Assessment Board, the same board that reviews new degree programs for all of B.C.’s public universities.

Smart believes in the rigour of the process, pointing out that not all applicants are approved to offer degrees. But if approved, she says, “there’s a high probability they’ll deliver on all of their targets.”

At the very least, Sprott-Shaw has longevity on its side. It has come a long way since its humble beginnings in 1903 as the Vancouver Business Institute, famed early on mostly for turning out legions of crackerjack shorthand typists. Despite an impressive history, the college languished in the 1970s and ’80s to the point of near collapse. Today it thrives as the province’s largest private career college, offering close to 140 programs at 17 campuses in B.C. and Alberta, as well as partnering with schools in Vietnam, the Philippines, Jordan and China.

At the helm since 1991, president and CEO Dean Duperron and his wife, Sherri, company VP, are credited with the school’s turnaround, including the realization of some impressive stats: more than 4,500 students trained annually and, as of fiscal year-end August 31, 2007, reported audited annual revenues of $32.6 million. The school’s performance has attracted its share of suitors. In fact, it was bought for $12 million in December 2007 by CIBT Education Group Inc., a Canada-based education-management group with significant operations in China.

The new owners have retained Duperron and the existing management team to oversee Sprott-Shaw’s day-to-day operations and its expansion into other parts of Canada and Asia.