What is anticipated to be an equally beneficial relationship between the University of Maryland Eastern Shore and the Dominica State College, DSC began with the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the two colleges earlier this month.
The agreement will result in student and faculty exchanges, research partnerships and the facilitation for the exchange of scholarly information between the two institutions.
GIS News spoke with President of the Dominica State College, Dr. Donald Peters, who says these are just some of the benefits that will come from this historic agreement.
He says ultimately the aim of the DSC is to help reduce the cost of higher education for Dominicans.
“We even talked about joint degree programmes in the future which is the trend in the 21st century. Higher education is expensive and a lot of universities cannot afford to put on a programme but if another one has the programme, they can work together to minimize the cost and one of them will issue the degree. We want to go in that direction too.
“Because higher education is expensive for residents and more so Government since a lot of people want to get money from Government to go overseas to study, it’s important that we minimise that cost,” he explained.
The University of Maryland Eastern Shore is a university within the Maryland public higher education system and it is also a land grant institution which means that it is also funded by the United States Federal Government.
Dr Peters says the university is therefore suited to help Dominican students by providing academic programmes for professions in the country’s two main industries: agriculture and tourism.
“The University of Maryland Eastern Shore is a land grant university. That means that their responsibility to the state is to help farmers, engineers and others to create employment and boost the economy of the state.
“They’re almost 100 years old so with that kind of experience, we can benefit from them. Dominica State College [doesn’t have] the resources to produce those programmes: the labs, farms and others so we are ready to do this.”
Dr. Peters went on to say, “There is a 24 room hotel on the campus which they use as a lab to train their students. People stay there and pay the rates for all the amenities of a commercial hotel. This is one of the areas where we can train our students in hospitality administration.”
The Dominica State College already has partnerships with several universities both in Canada and the United States.
There are also plans to create partnerships with even more universities in the future.
