Education/training | Making Connections | Personal Advancement | Self-employment | Career Options

Education/training

Schools forge international partnerships

Articulation agreements have nothing to do with clear speech or two-part buses that bend in the middle. Instead, they are a common feature of the Canadian educational landscape as schools come together to offer their students career path options.

DAVID CHILTON -- Special to the Toronto Sun

[ 2008-01-23 ]

Send to a friend

Students in the Aviation Management program at Georgian College in Barrie, Ont., can now receive their degree from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Worldwide in Daytona Beach, Fla., by completing 10 courses on the Barrie campus.

Most of these articulation agreements are still between schools in this country. But, increasingly, partnerships are being forged between schools here and those in the U.S. and elsewhere.

A case in point -- actually two cases in point -- are recent agreements signed by Mohawk College in Hamilton and the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and Georgian College in Barrie and the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Worldwide in Daytona Beach, Fla.

Of course, Mohawk and Georgian have well-established reputations of their own, but as academics at both colleges point out, Berklee and Embry-Riddle are world renowned in their respective disciplines and can't help but bring a high gloss to a student's resume. For their services Berklee charges Mohawk students $21,000 a year and Embry-Riddle's tuition fee is $10,000.

"EMBRY-RIDDLE YEAR"

Barbara Marshall, dean of Business and Management Studies at Mohawk, says her school has long had an agreement with Embry whereby students from the Barrie school could head to Daytona to further their studies, but cost held back far too many of them.

Now, says Marshall, thanks to the articulation agreement, students at Georgian, after they've completed their three-year diploma in Aviation Management, can do what might conveniently be called "an Embry-Riddle year" -- 10 courses delivered on the Barrie campus -- and receive a degree from Embry-Riddle in Technical Management.

The Embry-Riddle year begins this September, and Marshall expects to enrol 20 to 25 students. Classes will be taught by Georgian faculty, Embry-Riddle faculty and others, says Marshall, who's quick to point out would-be flyers need to look elsewhere.

"It's not a pilot's program. We don't do anything about teaching people to fly," she says.

Instead, the focus is on the business side of aviation -- whether students are enrolled in the diploma program or the Embry-Riddle year, Marshall notes. That means studying such subjects as airport management, emergency planning, security, meteorology, as well as aviation law, accounting, macroeconomics and so on.

BOSTON

Staying put isn't an option for Mohawk graduates who want a Berklee education, and whose agreement with the Hamilton school came about largely through the connections of Darcy Hepner, a professor in the applied music program.

Hepner, who grew up in Hamilton, taught at Berklee for four years, which brought questions from his Mohawk students about how they might go to Boston for more study.

Wheels started to turn and about a year latter an agreement -- signed last August -- was in place. Any applicant from Mohawk must do three years at the college -- which Hepner characterizes as learning the basics of the musical trade -- before going on to Berklee for a year. Graduates of the Mohawk program who are accepted receive 60 credits towards a 120-credit, four-year degree.

So far just one Mohawk student -- Eric Thachuk -- has gone on to Boston, and Hepner expects one or two a year will follow him.

"It (the articulation agreement) helped quite a bit,"Thachuk says. "I mastered the basic harmony work I did at Mohawk."

But there's more to Berklee than skipping the grunt work, acknowledges Thachuk, who plays electric bass. There are 400 bassists at the school, for one thing, he says admiringly, but not all of them are in the performance stream, a note of what seems like relief just audible in his voice.