Camosun has long been the go-to school for career changes, academic rematches, education with less financial pressure, and friction-free pathways to heavyweight institutions such as UVic and UBC. Camosun’s purpose is built on the principle of accessibility. But let’s be real here: if you work, if you have familial responsibilities, if you have to wrestle with corporate or government departments that are practically sulfur-perfumed sardine cans on the weekends, if you have anything that keeps you occupied outside of school, Camosun becomes far less accessible. But there’s a way to ease this pressure: night classes.
Students need to keep the jobs they have, and those often require day shifts. Life is expensive. For most full-time workers, adults, and those with significant responsibilities, walking away from a shift isn’t just risky or stressful—it’s logistically impossible. Walking away from paid hours to most of us means cutting parts out of our grocery lists, feeling the nagging worry of a rent increase itching in the back of the skull, neglecting responsibilities, or losing out on a promotion.
Night classes help to bridge this gap. They let those with jobs and other responsibilities work their way toward courses in a way that both eases stress and is financially feasible, removing the dilemma between choosing one’s education or survival.
Furthermore, while this may sound unusual, full-time students benefit hugely from night classes, perhaps even more so than part-time learners.
Firstly, full-time students often deal with the uniquely suffocating annoyance of having the awkwardly placed 45-minute gaps in between their back-to-back afternoon and morning classes; gaps that are too short to realistically get much serious studying and deep-thinking time in, gaps that are too short to allow students to clear some of their responsibilities, gaps that are too short to go anywhere, and gaps that are too long for quick revision.
Even if the gaps were less awkward, almost all university-credit courses seem to occur during morning-afternoon periods, the exact periods where the college’s vital help centres and facilities open. For us residen… uh, users of the college’s help centres, having the time to really sit down, think deeply, get into flow state, and ask silly, awkward questions in real time to experts about why acceleration points inwards in circular motion, why our essay doesn’t seem to scratch that emotional itch that makes it feel just right, or what on Earth an eigenvalue is is often is the difference between a B- and an A+.
This hurts all students, but STEM students suffer especially greatly from the lack of flexible night courses.
Not only are they tethered to two-to-three-hour labs mostly stuffed into prime study and help-centre time, but their lectures are too. For those of us taking these courses—students in programs such as Biology or MechE technologies—the lack of night courses practically walls off the prime time where tutors are active and the brain is the most awake.
While of course the omnipotent, all-powerful issue of funding hangs over this like the Sword of Damocles, the potential for increased enrolment coming from granting breathing room could help to offset this.
And, yes, online courses do exist. However, having an actual instructor correct your mistakes and talk to you in real time is invaluable for sinking one’s teeth into complex, new topics.
Camosun offering more night classes could be a win-win situation, and one that the college will hopefully consider moving ahead.