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Education
August 11, 2010 ■ Stories about local schools, students and issues related to learning A
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Alma Nunez, a Canada College student intending to major in linguistics at a University of California campus, converses with Canada College President Thomas Mohr on a recent afternoon at the hilltop campus in Woodside.
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ntroductory chemistry for freshman science majors at the University of California at Berkeley enrolls about 1,000 students who take turns filling up a 350-seat lecture hall for the three sections of the
class, according to a chemistry department spokesperson. At UCLA, the chemistry lecture hall seats 300. Study the same essential course material at the hilltop campus of Canada College, located in
Woodside and Redwood City, and you will likely have 35 classmates, and you’re less likely to have to give up home cooking and your own bed. You’ll also pay less, much less. A school year at Canada runs around $750 for a fulltime student versus an average of $20,800 at California State University or $27,000 at UC for a student living on campus, according to spokesmen for the
Going the distance By Dave Boyce
Almanac Staff Writer
CSU and UC systems. Textbooks are another $300 to $600, Canada officials added, but that cost can be cut by renting the books or, for some classes, borrowing them from the library. Students can always sell them back to the bookstore at the semester’s end. There are drawbacks. When class is over at Canada, you don’t walk out into a vibrant youthful stream of several thousand peers from everywhere on the planet walking in every direction at once on a campus steeped in tradition. Nor is the campus situated in cosmopolitan Berkeley or Los Angeles. At Canada, you’ll have a bird’s-eye and often windswept
Photo by Michelle Le/The Almanac
view of the Bay Area. And you can approach the transition to college work over time and with ample personal attention rather than total immersion in a new, complex and challenging milieu. Continued on page 19
On the cover Olga Pena, who is studying medical assisting at Canada College, has another year to go before transferring to the nursing program at San Jose State University under an agreement for preferred admission — if she maintains a grade-point average of 3.0 or better. Photo by Michelle Le/The Almanac.
In hard times and shrinking UC and CSU enrollments, is community college a viable alternative for the first two years? August 11, 2010 N The Almanac N 17