‘Better than evens’ chance of university partnership
THE likelihood of a Guernsey international university being founded is now ‘better than evens’, according to the deputy spearheading efforts to set it up.
Charles Parkinson, who is president of Economic Development, said universities interested in partnering on the project would be invited to an on-island workshop in May.
The idea of an international university was set out in ED’s strategy report last year.
If a university of 1,000 students was established, the report said that the benefits could be about £10m. annually with some £2m. going to general revenue – plus more than £21m. of indirect benefits per year, representing 1% of GDP.
‘We’ve got a number of universities who are interested in partnering with us,’ he said.
‘We’re proposing to hold a workshop in Guernsey in May to which we will invite interested universities to try and take the project forward, to understand better what they need from us and what we can get from them.’
Asked if the interested universities were well-known names, he said: ‘They’re all in the world top 1,000 universities.
‘Our concept at the moment is to have four, five maybe six partners representing quite disparate geographies.
‘So we’d like to have a partner in Australia, a partner in Canada, a partner in eastern Europe, etc, maybe Scandinavia.’
Deputy Parkinson also gave his assessment on how likely it was that a Guernsey international university would get off the ground.
‘I think we’re now in the better than evens level. Clearly, the key factors have been to find the partners who want to do this with us and to define the specialisations that the university is going to teach.
‘And we’re making good progress in finding the partners and the partners themselves will help us determine what the specialisations are. But we have a better idea now of what the areas of focus are for academic subjects.’
