Seneca International Academy: The good, the bad and the virusy | Academic Newsletter | Seneca Polytechnic

by Brian Bell, Seneca International Academy

in the December 2020 issue

Well, this is not the article it would have been, but there’s no point in crying over spilt viruses…

The Seneca International Academy (SIA) is a new initiative of Seneca: originally to be located at the Markham campus, SIA is devoted to international students and offering them the education, services, and supports they require in an integrated manner. Needless to say, SIA’s planning changed direction a bit in March – the Academy is still a go, but like most of Seneca, it’s in a virtual environment… for now.

SIA officially opened its doors to students in September: we have 425 students now and have slightly more than 1,000 “paids” for the winter 2021 term. Ceteris paribus, we’re counting on 500 or more new students in January; with a bit of good fortune, we’ll have 1,000 active students.

For September, SIA offered 22 programs: 11 Grad Certs, 7 Diploma programs, and 4 Advanced Diploma programs. SIA doesn’t actually own any of these programs: about two thirds of them are from Business and the rest split between FCAD and FASET. So far, SIA students are mostly interested in Graduate Certificate programs (66%) with Diplomas running a distant second (22%) and Advanced Diplomas being the least in demand (12%). This trend is even more pronounced in the winter 2021 data.

Demand for programs is not evenly split – some, like Business Analytics, are wildly popular (we can’t meet demand) while others have only a handful of students. Our four most popular programs make up 50% of SIA’s student population.

In today’s virtual world, we are mushing© (this is a highly-technical term used internally only) SIA students in with other students. So, for faculty, you might have SIA students in your class now. There are some SIA-only sections, but very few. We will be adjusting program offerings ongoing in an attempt to best match student demand with school capacity. We have also created a student advisory group and hope to learn from them and adjust SIA accordingly.

It’s interesting (well, to me anyway and to the helpful folks at the Centre for Institutional Data and Enterprise Analytics) to compare some of the SIA student characteristics¹ to those of Seneca at large:

• A larger percentage of the student population in SIA identifies as male. Approximately 50% of the Seneca-at-large student population identifies as male (though this varies significantly by program) and the trend shows the percentage of students who identify as female is increasing (almost entirely due to increases in domestic students who identify as female). In SIA, 65% of the students identify as male; we’re investigating possible reasons for this.
• The age distribution of SIA students is different too: SIA has fewer students under 19 (no surprise), but more between 25 and 34, and fewer over 40.
• As you likely know, all of SIA’s students are international. There is no dramatic difference in country of origin: the top four countries for Seneca (India, China, Vietnam and Iran, in that order) are the same for SIA.

So, it’s still early days for SIA but the doors are open, students are here (sort of...), and more are applying. We’ll keep working with the different schools to best fit our offerings to demand and, while in a virtual world, will continue to mush students together and utilize existing services. All in, SIA is off to a good start; not the one we’d planned on, but good nevertheless!

¹ _{All differences noted are statistically significant at p < 0.5 (95% confidence level)}

View the December 2020 issue of the Academic Newsletter.