About

The Canada Student Loans Program of Human Resources and Social Development Canada (HRSDC), in partnership with British Columbia Student Aid and the National Association of Career Colleges, contracted DLB Consulting Inc. in 2007 to conduct research that would produce a compilation of innovative practices with respect to efforts of private educational institutions toward ensuring student success. These efforts of private career colleges demonstrate the positive participation of the institutions in their students’ lives, helping students to make appropriate choices of program of study, to successfully complete their training, and to confidently move from school to work or to further education. Additionally, student success is generally understood as including the repayment of student loan debt.

Research for this project focused on practices that were implemented within six phases of college-student interaction: pre-enrollment, enrollment, attendance, early withdrawal, graduation and post graduation. These practices are derived from principles that appear to transcend institutional size. While large colleges are perhaps able to commit greater resources to a given activity, we discovered that colleges of varying student enrollments effectively utilized these practices. This document presents a number of innovative practices grouped as follows:

  1. Academic excellence
  2. Student centric core value
  3. Pre-enrollment assessment and testing
  4. Effective orientation
  5. Personal and financial counsel
  6. Internship and practicum
  7. Job placement assistance
  8. Administrative excellence
  9. Sector involvement

It is hoped that this website and Guide will enable private institutions to better pursue student loan repayment rate improvement plans, which can lead to reduced financial risk to the student loan program.

Finally, it is hoped that this will be a living document. Over time new approaches will be discovered that will further enhance the potential for student success. The enduring legacy of this project will, in some sense, be the extent to which Canada’s Private Career College community continues to contribute through the open sharing of ideas. In the sharing of innovative practices and lessons learned, the institutions will benefit through improvement of the services they provide to students. In private education, improving the quality of training to students is a sound business practice.