An International Recruitment and Admissions partnership is being expanded to include Southeast and Northwest Colleges for the 2022-23 academic year. 

The partnership, which originally included Great Plains, Cumberland, and Parkland colleges, was established as a pilot project in October of last year.  

“They combined efforts to do international student recruiting for all three institutions together,” Manager of Marketing and Communications, Sheena Onrait said. “They had great success the last year, so with great success comes the sharing of knowledge.” 

Onrait said Great Plains, Cumberland, and Parkland colleges got into contact with Southeast and Northwest Colleges, and they agreed to join in the partnership.  

The colleges will be working under the “Saskatchewan Colleges” banner, in an effort to build a reputation of the colleges in the international education market. The partnership focuses on recruiting new international students.  

“The coalition works with a number of recruitment agencies across the world. Their jobs are to go and promote the colleges in Saskatchewan,” Onrait said. Normally the students are pretty well versed on what they want to take for school and where they want to want to end up in Saskatchewan. Then they work with the student to determine which program and which location best fits that student’s needs.” 

Onrait explained that it is a win-win situation to have extra students coming to our communities, both for the regional college system and for the students because they're getting introduced to a number of opportunities in Saskatchewan at the same time. 

“Here in Estevan, we welcomed our first international students. We have four international students in our Continuing Care Assistant Program this fall in Estevan, and they are having a wonderful experience so far.” 

Onrait added the partnership is an opportunity to learn about other regional colleges and Saskatchewan.  

“It's really a great advantage for the regional colleges to come together in this coalition partnership,” she said. “We're after the same goal, we all want to want to bring students and we all have limited resources for recruiting international students overseas. So, this allows us to work together to pool our resources and have a bigger impact.”   

Information can be found HERE on programs that accept international students.