Last summer, St. Clair President Patti France delivered a speech to Windsor’s Women In Construction organization, featuring an encouraging observation.
As she’d flipped through the 2016-17 college Yearbook of graduating class photos, she noticed an increasingly significant percentage of women in technology and trades programs.
And she was able to pass on that observation to the Women In Construction audience – informing them that the long-standing campaign to attract more females to Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (“STEM”) academic programs and occupations was, apparently, getting its message across.
Now she can add another example – and a nationally remarkable one – of that trend.
Professor John Ulakovich recently announced that St. Clair’s Computer Networking programs, which are Cisco Network Academy-certified, are ranked Number One in Canada for having the largest enrolment of females.
The 50 female students enrolled in the programs represents 23 percent of their total student population. The national average is 13 percent.
A portion of the group gathered for a celebratory photo in the Student Life Centre on February 12, joined by President France (front right).
The college is also ranked Number Two in total enrolment in Canada for 2017 among the scores of Cisco-certified computer programs at Canadian postsecondary institutions.
The college’s huge influx of international students during the past two years has been a significant factor in both the female and overall enrolment increases in the Computer Networking programs.
(This achievement might be doubly relevant for France. The President’s first postsecondary credential was as a woman-in-STEM herself, as the recipient of a diploma in Computer Programming from St. Clair in the mid-1990s.)
