LU aiming to double Aboriginal students

Lakehead University’s new president is aiming to double the number of Aboriginal students within the next 10 years.
“Right now we have more than 1,000 Aboriginal students — I’d like to double that amount of students at least,” said Brian Stevenson, the newly installed president and vice-chancellor at Lakehead University. “One of the challenges we have in bringing more Aboriginal students to university is the high school dropout rate among Aboriginal students, which is very high.”
Stevenson is looking to develop a program to approach Aboriginal students in the fourth and fifth grades to engage them with the university so they aspire to go university.
“Once we have students who are in high school, we can recruit them for university at about the same rate as students in the general population,” Stevenson said. “The problem is a lot of the students we could have recruited have already dropped out, so the first mission is to help the school system to help families with encouraging the students not to drop out of high school so they can aspire to go to university.”
Stevenson’s second challenge is to help adult students who have dropped out of high school but since completed their high school equivalency to attend university as adult learners.
Stevenson said his first goal is to set up a scholarship fund for both types of students similar to the Opportunity Fund at the University of Winnipeg, where he was a professor in the Faculty of Business and Economics and served as provost and vice-president (academic) from 2006-2010.
“So both of these kinds of students are going to be able to set up a scholarship fund,” Stevenson said. “They can see once they are in the fourth and the fifth and the sixth grade that there will be a scholarship in their name to go to university if they want to. And on the other hand to help the adult students with the financial support that they need to come to university.”
Stevenson said the program at the University of Winnipeg brings students, starting with the fourth and fifth grades, onto the university campus to participate in activities during the summer and on weekends.
“For every year they participate in those programs and hand in their grades, there is a certain amount of money that is put in their name as a tuition fee credit when they go to university,” Stevenson said.
“So by the time they finish high school they could have one to two years of tuition fee already as a scholarship in their name because they have been participating with the university.”
Stevenson is also looking to develop an outreach program that encourages Aboriginal youth to “see the university as their own, to see it as a university they can aspire to be a part of.”
Stevenson said it is relatively straightforward to bring students from Thunder Bay and the surrounding area to the university, but it is more challenging to reach students from further away.
“I’m working on a number of ideas to try to reach out to those students as much as we can with the resources we have,” Stevenson said. “Part of it will have to be through distance learning or telepresence systems that will help us engage the students.”
Field trips to the university may also be a possibility, Stevenson said.
“I’m going to be visiting a number of First Nation communities in the northwest over the next eight or 10 months and these are some of the questions I am going to ask,” Stevenson said.
“How is it that we can engage their youth in the university when they are younger and they are more impressionable so they begin to feel normal about university – that this is something they can achieve and they can do.”