University of Canada West

I do not recall seeing the University of Canada West mentioned before on degreeinfo. It looks legit.
http://www.ucan.ca/Online_and_Campus_Programs/Online_Programs/Online_Programs

 

I'm in the habit of using the excellent CICIC website to research schools in Canada.

It generates this list of higher education institutions in BC. And here's the listing for University Canada West.

It's private, apparently proprietary and new, authorized in 2004. I kind of follow higher education in BC from afar and don't recall hearing anything about this one, so it might be pretty obscure in the Canadian scheme of things. It's based in Victoria, which isn't all that big a place, so you would expect a new university there to make a splash. Reportedly its campus there is a former elementary school.

Significantly, it does seem to have all the provincial ministerial consents required under BC's new 2002 University Authorization Act. In fact, it reportedly was the first private university authorized under that act. But it isn't a member of the AUCC. It's hard to translate Canadian schools into US terms, but I'm inclined to interpret this as something analogous to DETC or ACICS. (Apparently Canadians argue about the importance of the AUCC like Americans argue about RA/NA.)

I'm a little put off by their advertising that people can finish 4-year degrees in two years, but some participants on this board will probably like that. They highlight prior-learning assessment too, which some will find attractive too.

Their 'campus locations' page talks about their two campuses, in Victoria and Vancouver. But it looks like there's a third location as well, in Singapore. This branch seems to be run in cooperation with Kaplan, or something. That, along with their ESL classes and their emphasis on DL, suggests that they are aiming to market their school internationally, probably emphasizing Asia.

There's something about opening a new campus in Comox too. And the same people seem to be in the process of opening a new Whistler University. I don't know what's up with that. Wouldn't it make more sense for a new school to be a little more focused on getting one initial campus up and running before turning their attention to creating an empire?

The thing is headed up by a former President of the University of Victoria. He's apparently an advocate for creating Canadian private universities, and was quoted arguing that case in 'Macleans'. Predictably, the Canadian university faculty organizations are less than pleased.

To some extent it looks like they just reflexively oppose private universities on principle. But more to the point, they criticize UCW for not being a research institution, for hiring its faculty from retired professors and business people and presumably paying them less than scale, and for not giving them enough voice in university governance. The professors complain that UCW has lower admissions standards and higher tuition than conventional universities, aiming at domestic Canadian students who couldn't get into the public universities and at students overseas.

The unfortunate thing about all this is that UCW's vision and the faculty unions' opposition to it both seem to equate 'private university' with the University of Phoenix. What Canada really needs is a strong and vital private university sector that's modeled a bit more on Stanford and MIT.

 

From the website of University of Canada Western,
"For a large number of students, the Degree Completion programs at University Canada West offer the most effective and efficient education solutions to students hoping to earn their degrees and enter the workforce ahead of their peers. In this video, Tracy Demchuk, Director of Admissions and UCAN's Associate Registrar for Vancouver and Online programs, discusses how applicants can transfer credit from other institutions in order to earn their undergraduate and MBAs a lot faster than they could at most universities."

This sounds much akin to many universities in the USofA and does not seem as though it should raise concerns at least on the surface.

Admission to universities in Canada is rather easy for mature applicants. The overall admissions standards have been on the rise but I doubt very much a motivated high school student could not gain admission to at least a few universities in Canada upon graduation with an overall average of 80%.