Peter Stoicheff, president of the University of Saskatchewan. (Dulce Abela/650 CKOM)

By Derek Craddock

THE U OF S IN 2024

USask President says P.A. Campus has room to flourish in 2024

Jan 3, 2024 | 6:00 AM

The last 12 months saw tremendous growth for a post-secondary school that’s been a part of the Prince Albert community for years.

Although the local campus of the University of Saskatchewan officially opened in 2020 on Central Avenue, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s only been in the last year that the campus has started to flourish.

Those are the words of University President Peter Stoicheff who spoke to paNOW to share his excitement for 2024 and the growth of the P.A. campus.

“We’ve got easily 500 students enrolled there. We’ve suddenly got many more programs than we ever used to have and the right or appropriate sort of classroom spaces, labs and so on for those programs,” he said.

Those programs include nursing, upper years of medicine, arts and sciences, and the dental therapy program, which launched this past fall.

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But Stoicheff noted the Prince Albert campus is capable of even more.

“We want to develop programming as much as we can throughout the province so that people have access to this university,” he said. “Seeing more and more programs that are available to students at the Saskatoon campus being available to students at the PA campus, we can’t duplicate everything, but we can continue to offer in PA more and more of our programming there.”

Stoicheff said the university continues to receive feedback from city council, local school boards, businesses, alumni, and residents to get a sense of what the school can do better and how they can best serve the community.

“If all of those things continue to happen, we build more programming, we get more feedback about how we can do better, we see more people using the P.A. campus,” he said. “Getting full degrees there or getting the first couple of years of a degree and then feeling comfortable to come to Saskatoon.”

In August, the university held its annual leaders’ summit in Prince Albert as a way to highlight the growth of the campus.

Back then, Stoicheff pointed out the school made many inroads to offer its programs outside the main campus in Saskatoon.

“We are the University of Saskatchewan, not just the University of Saskatoon,” he said. “I hope that the people of P.A. are proud to have not just a university campus there, but a campus of the University of Saskatchewan. I think they deserve to know that the university is doing tremendously well.”

Building on that, Stoicheff pointed out that the school is one of the top 50 research universities in Canada and has climbed those rankings on an international scale.

Enrolment also rose three per cent in 2023, which Stoicheff looks at as a major success.

“You don’t see that across the country at most universities and so there’s a lot of building that we have to do and imagining creative spaces and there’s a lot that can be named.”

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derek.craddock@pattisonmedia.com