President of Bermuda College, Dr. Michael Orenduff, yesterday revealed that from this autumn students will be given a guarantee that their course credits will be accepted by any US or Canadian universities - or their money back.

He said any student whose credits from the college were not accepted in the US or Canada would be offered a full refund for the course where marks were not accepted.

And he said the guarantee covered every university or college institute, including the likes of top notch schools Harvard and Yale.

Dr. Orenduff said the college had kept tabs on previous students who had gone overseas and found that almost all of their credits had been accepted.

And he said as the college vice president Dr. Larita Alford had been forming articulation agreements with a number of institutions this year, Bermuda College was becoming even more widely recognised.

He said sometimes universities would only accept 50 of the 60 credits from Bermuda College, for example, resulting in the student having to resit part of their course work again at their new university.

In those cases he said, students would be able to apply for a refund for the original course they took in Bermuda, which on average can cost about $250.

However, Dr. Orenduff said he was confident the college would not have to pay out a great deal.

“It's a guarantee that if their credits are not accepted at any accredited institution in the US or Canada because they are from Bermuda College, then they will receive a tuition refund for those credits,” said the president.

“We are confident it won't happen too often. We track our students that transfer overseas and their credits for transfer. Most of them are accepted.

“There will be one or two because it does happen, but we believe most will be accepted.”

During recent months, Dr. Alford has formed partnerships with overseas colleges who specialise in law, nursing, teacher training, medicine, business and computer technology, to name a few.

In doing that, Dr. Orenduff said Bermuda College was more firmly on the educational map.

However, he said from October this year, the college would begin the long process of applying to be accredited in the United States.

It will take about two years to complete the procedure and will involve the college carrying out a detailed audit on itself, before being examined by a group of inspectors who will travel to the Island.

A report will be written before a recommendation is made, but then it will be up to the New England Association of Schools and Colleges as to whether or not Bermuda College should be accepted into the fold.

Dr. Orenduff, who took over at the helm of the college last summer on a three-year contract with a brief to turn it into a more relevant and efficient community college, said if it were to receive the accreditation by the summer of 2004, he would be happy.

He added: “It would be wonderful for me to know that I was leaving a college that was accredited in the US.”

The president spoke at the Hamilton Rotary Club luncheon yesterday and said the college was on course to properly serve the community after beefing up the more practical courses it offered, and setting up a number of additional partnerships whereby students could complete two years of a four-year degree programme on the Island.

However, he said more was to come and improvement was still needed.

The president said enabling more students to do half of a degree programme at Bermuda College substantially reduced their costs and made the option of further education more viable for a number of Bermudians. However, he said there were also other advantages.

The president told Rotary members that statistical data in the US proved that students who completed the first two years of a degree at a community college before transferring to a university did better than those who had been there for the whole four-year course.

And he said a series of advertisements for the College - due to be released on the Island later this year - would quote executives from overseas colleges stating that fact as it related to Bermudian students.

He said: “Students who complete two years here actually do better at universities overseas than students who started those universities as freshman.”