The number of full-time students at Bermuda College has fallen by almost a quarter in the last year — but new president Duranda Greene has pledged to reverse the trend.

Figures provided to The Royal Gazette by Dr. Greene, who took over as president last week, reveal that on February 2 this year the publicly-funded college had 1,005 students — 255 of them full time and 750 part time.

The figures do not include those taking courses at the Professional and Career Development Centre. The numbers have dropped since the same time last year by just under 23 percent for full time students and almost four percent for part time.

Dr. Greene said: “That is something that we will be addressing. It’s something that we are taking to the college board.”

She said the number of full time or traditional students — i.e. those studying for 12 or more credits — was directly linked to the poor public school graduation rate.

“One of the challenges we do know we face is because our high school graduation rates are low and most of our full time students would come from that field,” she said. “Once that goes down our enrolment goes down.”

The college is trying to help improve achievement in schools by taking part in a Government review of the education system.

Dr. Greene said: “We have several persons in this campus who have graduate degrees in education that can provide some assistance.

“We have had three meetings with the education review team.”

Another of her objectives is to work directly with senior schools on their curriculum to ensure a “more seamless transition” to college because many students arrive at the start of each academic year without the required level of English and maths.

“A lot of students have to do developmental courses or college prep courses,” said Dr. Greene. “Some of those may not be full time students because they are doing less than 12 credits.”

The new president plans to personally visit public and private schools to convince students — and their parents — that opting to do the first two years of a bachelor’s degree at the college, as she herself did, makes good economic and educational sense.

“I think I, as an alumnus, can speak very intelligently and factually about the benefits of Bermuda College leading up to next year’s enrolment.”

The majority of full time students at the college are now in the business and hospitality divisions, closely followed by liberal arts. Some critics have blamed falling enrolment on the declining number of technical education students, as the National Training Board (NTB) chooses to send higher numbers of apprentices overseas.

Dr. Greene said: “The enrolment has declined but I don’t think the majority of the decline is because of technical education. It’s always been our smallest division since we moved to this campus. We are in discussions with the NTB now to clarify our roles and so there is more support of one another.”

She added that many young people shied away from technical education and hospitality courses. The college plans to run a technical education camp for middle school students this summer and has a culinary arts camp as part of a long-term plan to encourage youngsters to consider those career options.

“Hopefully..we will see a change in that mindset,” said Dr. Greene. “The courses are here and we continue to offer those courses.”

She said a recent report on the cost of educating a student at the college — calculated by this newspaper as more than $26,000 by dividing the college’s $18.1 million government grant by enrolment figures given in the Senate — did not tell the full story.

“I don’t think you can just take the budget and divide it by the number of students,” she said. “There are other people and other organisations using the facility. The library is open to the general public. By using that formula you do not see all that we do.” And, of recent claims that the college is overstaffed for the number of students — it has 44 full time and 63 part time lecturers giving a staff to student ratio of about one to nine — Dr. Greene said: “That’s something that we are looking at in preparation for next year’s budget.”