portion of the population, according to former president of the institution, Archie Hallett. With a varied day programme and a host of evening electives, the facility provides courses for a lifetime of needs. "In society generally, people graduate and take a job,'' the academic explained. "But between that point and retirement, they will change their job at least once, often twice or more. This doesn't mean they're drifting, it means that they are having a change in heart or wanting a different experience or got burned out. Our point of view is that for people who are likely to want a change, we want to give them a good basic foundation. They can take precise training in whatever it is they want to start with, but they have to have a good general background so that they are easily able to switch to something else. "Because if you're working in a company and you've decided you want to upgrade your skills in whatever direction you want to go, that will give you a better chance of promotion, a higher salary and a better position.'' Such opportunities are not limited solely to full-time students, he said. Night courses, he stressed, are also there to augment the potential of persons already in the workforce. "In a sense it's one of the most important parts of the college. I'm not trying to downgrade the fulltime programme, but you can go in the evening and do a number of things that we don't do in the daytime which are important to people as they try and upgrade. "And in that light, we do quite a number of professional qualifications. Yes, we teach accounting and business administration to students in the day, but for the more advanced levels, those courses leading to a professional qualification, you can come in the evening and take some of those courses necessary to qualify for a CA or a CPA or whatever.'' The College is also becoming recognised for many of its latent services, he added, as a resource of expert information and a ground from which statistics may be gathered. "I think that gradually, people are beginning to realise more and more that the college has resources which can be tapped. Like every other resource, they are not free, you will have to pay for them, but you would have to do so from wherever you got them and the College's rates are exceptionally heavy.'' Although well equipped as an excellent training ground, applicants to the hotel side of the faculty of Hotel and Business Administration have been on the decline, said Dr. Hallett, as many opt not to enter the industry. That same decline has been noted with those entering the College to learn a trade. "I've got to be careful here that I'm not stirring too many political waters, but the climate of the times has been suggesting to the young people in the schools that because they're Bermudian, they should be able to get a white collar job. Something they see as being an advantage. In the old system you would sort students out, saying, `You're academically very capable I think you should go on and train to be a lawyer or a doctor or accountant or whatever', or, to those who were not quite so good at numbers and writing prose and that sort of thing, `A technical education would hold a place for you.' But we're not allowed to do that anymore.

Basically the youth now have to make up their own minds. They have to make their own decisions which, unfortunately, often turns out to be not too well informed. So there has been a reluctance of people to follow the trades yet there is a definite cry for this in Bermuda.'' Dr. Hallett said that revolutionary changes in technology have caused a marked difference in what one now expects from tradesmen. "Trades are no longer as easily identified as others. Some of them still maintain pretty well what they have to do, like being a carpenter for example, where you're working with wood, but if you're working as say, an automobile mechanic, the computer has made such inroads into the cars that there are now quite a number of mechanisms which, as a automobile mechanic, you're going to have to learn. The car comes to you with that in it and you have to learn sophisticated technology and how to fix it.

"Everything is virtually changing. Everything you see around you which is new, requires a new technique. It requires people to be adaptable and to learn a variety of skills. We're almost back to the same pattern like the good old Bermudian workman who in fact did masonry, a bit of carpentry, put on a roof, could do a bit of wiring and put in the plumbing.'' PHOTO College graduates MINI SUPPLEMENT SUP