14,351.
St. Clair’s 2018-19 fall enrolment – based on the traditional head-count occurring ten days after the start of the academic year – is unprecedented in the school’s history, and shattered the previous year’s record of 11,953.
The campus-by-campus, program-by-program enrolment numbers were presented to the college’s Board of Governors (BofG) during its September 25th meeting. The paperwork report was accompanied by a presentation by Associate Vice-President of Student Services and Registrar Mike Silvaggi.
Of that 14,000-plus, 13,692 are full-time students in postsecondary, adult training and apprenticeship programs. That number, also, far surpasses 2017-18’s fall population of full-timers (11,361).
In addition to an enrolment increase this fall, the huge jump represents massive intakes of students last January and May.
It should also be noted that the numbers include 1,182 students enrolled in a half-dozen St. Clair-administered programs at the college’s “sister school” in Toronto, the Ace Acumen Academy. [That enrolment will be lost within the next year or so, due to a provincial government edict to eliminate private/public college partnerships. See the background on that at http://stclair-src.org/news/need-know-news/publicprivate-college-partnerships-mothballed.]
One other specification was included in the report to the BofG: Full-time, postsecondary enrolment at the Windsor and Chatham Campuses is made up of 7,615 Canadian/“domestic” students (year-over-year, a declining number), and 4,018 international students (for the past several years, a monumentally escalating number).
There is a huge new influx of St. Clair students in downtown Windsor because there’s a new building there. In addition to the approximately 1,100 students at the Centre for the Arts and MediaPlex (in itself, a large combined-population increase), there are also almost 490 students at the new Zekelman School of Business and Information Technology at One Riverside Drive. Based there are Business, Human Resources Management and the new Data Analytics for Business programs.
(The extra space provided by One Riverside Drive was acquired as the college awaits provincial government approval to construct a new Academic Tower at its South Windsor Campus.)
A significant number of international students have also enrolled in programs at the Chatham Campus, pushing its enrolment up slightly to 1,279.
The largest single School at the college (its Windsor Campuses) is Business and Information Technology. Including the aforementioned enrolment at One Riverside Drive, it is teaching 4,118 students this fall – about 90 percent more than last year.
Other Schools’ populations are: Community Studies, 1,422; Engineering Technologies, 1,408; Nursing, 1,066; Media, Art and Design, 1,041; Health Sciences, 772; and Skilled Trades, 616.
DEMOGRAPHIC ODDS ‘N’ ENDS
Silvaggi also provided these observations:
• The top “country-of-origin” of the college’s international contingent is – by a huge margin – India, with 3,667 students. Next (in the low hundreds) is China, followed by Vietnam, Nigeria, South Korea, Brazil, the Philippines, Mexico and Jamaica. In all, over 60 countries have sent at least one student to St. Clair this year. Many European countries are now represented, Silvaggi noted, in the form of varsity athletes who have enrolled here;
• International students now comprise 21 percent of the college’s total population. Windsor-based domestic students represent 32 percent of the enrolment. Essex County communities are “showing growth”, as is enrolment on the part of students from the Greater Toronto Area;
• Twenty-nine percent of incoming, first-year students are fresh-out-of-high-school, under-19-year-olds … Meaning that the majority of frosh (including most internationals) are defined as “mature” students: over 19 years old, and maybe having already acquired some postsecondary education.
