All Posts Tagged With: "Northern Ontario"
Ontario announces first new law school in 42 years
Aboriginal and Northern students preferred
Photo courtesy of steakpinball on Flickr
Canada’s lawyer shortage might finally start to improve. Ontario announced yesterday that it will fund the first new law school to be built in the province in more than 42 years. Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont. received $1.5-million in funding and hopes to enroll students by 2013.
The new school will be the seventh in Ontario and the first-ever in northern Ontario. The only other new law school announced for Canada since the 1980s is the one under construction at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C., which will take its first 40 students in September.
Lakehead president Brian Stevenson said he aims to start with 55 students in 2013, but will accept up to 150 students after three years. The program will have a strong focus on aboriginal law, rural and remote practice, plus natural resource management — all specialties that cater to northern Ontario’s economy. The university will give preference to northern residents and aboriginal applicants.
Schools in Northern Ontario boast of room for students
Colleges lure city-dwellers north for their post-secondary degrees
While young people from remote areas typically gravitate toward bright city lights for their post-secondary education, their big-city Ontario counterparts might want to consider precisely the opposite: a trip to the land of the aurora borealis.
Schools in northern Ontario have more space for students than they can fill, even as urban colleges and universities face higher demand than they can meet. Administrators say they’re trying out new recruitment strategies in an effort to fill the gap.
Rather than build costly new schools on premium city land, the reasoning goes, why not offer incentives to lure city-dwellers north for their post-secondary degrees?
In a recession, employment levels and demand for college programs run in a counter-cyclical manner, said Fred Gibbons of Northern College, an applied-arts and technology school with four campuses spread across northeastern Ontario.
That’s partly why Northern has seen a “phenomenal” 32 per cent increase in enrolment over the last two years, Gibbons said.
As of July 31, all six northern colleges had seen applications increase by about 4.2 per cent, said Colleges Ontario spokesman Rob Savage. Still, many remote colleges and universities sit partially empty despite the increase in demand.
Immigration and the recession have fuelled a spike in applications to southern Ontario schools, too, where space is less plentiful. Provincewide, the average increase in application numbers at colleges is 10 per cent, Savage said.
“It would make sense, rather than new bricks and mortar, to utilize excess capacity in the system now,” Gibbons said. “There is simply more space available in classrooms than we can fill on our own at the present time.”
Northern College’s four campuses could accommodate as many as 700 more students, Gibbons estimated.
Last year, 200 students studied at the school’s campus in Kirkland Lake, Ont., though there’s room for 700. The other three campuses, in the northern Ontario towns of Moosonee, Haileybury and Porcupine, are also running well below capacity.
Hoping to get into med school?
Don’t be born in Ontario
For med school hopefuls, Ontario might seem like the perfect province to live in.
There are 17 med schools in the country. Six of those are in Ontario, more than any other province. But as I recently discovered, being born in Ontario is actually a huge handicap.
Most med schools prefer applicants from their own province. It makes sense: if you train local doctors, you produce local doctors. It’s not unusual to reserve 85 percent or even 90 percent of the available seats for in-province applicants. Most med schools even have higher entrance requirements for out-of-province applicants.
Everyone likes their own brand.
Except for Ontario. Not a single med school in Ontario reserves spots for Ontario applicants.
On the surface, the Northern Ontario School of Medicine and the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Western Ontario might seem like exceptions to the rule. On it’s website, Northern says that it encourages applications from “students who are from Northern Ontario and/or students who have a strong interest in and aptitude for practicing medicine in northern urban, rural and remote communities.” Western Ontario gives special consideration to applicants from “rural/regional communities in Southwestern Ontario.”
But neither of these med schools actually reserve spots for in-province applicants. Not to mention, those “rural and remote” communities that Northern Ontario mentions could actually be anywhere across Canada.
McMaster’s policy is a bit more complicated. They don’t actually reserve med school spots for in-province applicants. Instead, they award 90 percent of interview positions for Ontario residents.
Yeah, I know. I had to read that twice, too.
It means that once you reach the interview stage, it doesn’t matter which province you’re from.
Even if McMaster offered a genuine advantage to in-province applicants, it wouldn’t make much of a difference anyway. With over 4500 applicants and a success rate of 4.9 per cent in 2006/2007, getting into McMaster is like winning the med school lottery.
