The following excerpt has been taken from ‘A View from the Mount’, the blog of Mount Saint Vincent University President and Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Ramona Lumpkin.
Education goes hand in hand with social and economic prosperity
In conversations about the Mount, people often mention our size. That’s quite natural when you consider, in a world of mega-universities, our overall enrolment of 4,000 students and our average class size of 24.
Size alone isn’t what’s important, however, but rather the advantages we can derive from being small. Our typical class size means our professors really do know their students on a first-name basis. It’s our size that allows us to form close personal and professional connections with one another, creating a highly engaged learning community—a key component in the success of our students, staff, and faculty.
My colleague Dr. Robert Campbell, President of Mount Allison University and current Chair of the Association of Atlantic Universities, recently noted the importance of universities to our region. He wrote in The Globe and Mail that universities in Atlantic Canada are key economic drivers, stimulating growth and creating thousands of jobs. The primary role of universities, of course, is to stay true to our core mission—the education of our students. But education goes hand in hand with social and economic prosperity; the two are not mutually exclusive. We need to ensure that our students graduate with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed fully as human beings, and in turn their individual contributions after graduation will showcase the value of our time together. Our small size is a great asset in this undertaking… (more)
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