Dear Sir:
As a business student at the college, it is a shame the business instructors and students aren’t involved in finding a solution to its deficit. Otherwise, what is the purpose of instruction and learning?
Increasing education is good for our country as it results in increased labour productivity to improve our GDP per capita, an improvement in our living standards and an increase in our nation’s power in the international society.
The growth of labour productivity depends on physical capital growth, human capital growth, and technological advances – all closely connected with education.
We could get a bigger share of the GDP pie for education, but the share for other areas would shrink and we would face an unbalanced social system.
The solution is making the GDP pie bigger to then increase revenue for all areas, including education, of course.
NWCC can be the leader for northern BC business. Waiting for the government budget to increase is wrong. We need an action plan for the short, mid and long terms.
In the short term we know, thanks to a government study, the northwest labour force shortage is in a challenging situation.
What a good opportunity for the college if we can contract and charge employers for training qualified labor forces that they need.
Think of the eager students to willingly pay tuition at NWCC for a guaranteed job offer. What a win-win situation!
We need to think of this as supply and demand like an economist would. The increasing demand for labour will create an increased supply at NWCC to meet this demand and revenue will be generated. This will take two years.
A mid-term strategy should focus on an international student foundation. Over two or three years it will generate a $10 million fund for NWCC.
To reach this goal, we need to focus our eyes on the global demanding areas. There is a huge demand for Canadian education in Asian countries like China, Japan, Korea, Viet Nam, and Singapore. Historically, we used to have students from Japan, Korea, Macao, and China.
Unfortunately, the international programs did not run well because of the financial requirement from overseas Canadian embassies.
None of these rejected students realized that a $100,000 deposit was required for their visa approval to guarantee the student’s studying, food, and accommodation financially.
Let’s take our Qingdao partner college as an example. Last year they had 10 students who did the visa application for coming but only two of them were approved; this year they had 5 students who applied but only one was approved.
If we assume to have 100 students from Qingdao partner college coming here to study, and we have each of them put $100,000 in the “foundation”, we will have $10 million to guarantee these students coming smoothly without any trouble. Registering 100 qualified students from a country of 1.34 billion people is as easy finding a cider in Terrace tenure bush.
The third step comes after the second step is reached. Banks and financial institutions will chase the $10 million foundation.
We can start to plan some regional projects, like turning the Terrace airport land into an International free Trade Zone. As we all realized, the plan for setting up the industrial park have been discussed for years, but was hampered because of the financial situation.
Have you ever thought that the parents of our international students will be the first group of entrepreneurs to move in our International Free Trade Zone?
Have you ever thought how many job opportunities it will create for our college business program students? And, have you ever thought what a big influence NWCC will make to the local and global business?
There are thousands of expecting eyes watching the next step of the college. It’s time that we need to think creatively, work aggressively and create some pride.
Adam Tang,
Terrace, BC.
Adam Tang is a business student at Northwest Community College in Terrace.