The Bermuda College is expanding to meet the needs of the local community and to attract more overseas students, new president Dr. George Cook said yesterday.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Royal Gazette , the 54-year-old veteran educator and head of Bermuda's only post-secondary learning institution made it clear he is proud of the college's accomplishments.

But under his administration he plans to see the 16-year-old college offer a four-year degree in hospitality, develop its research capacity, and use its physical, human, and financial resources more efficiently.

"We have some very good people here who really do believe in the value of the work they're doing,'' said Dr. Cook, who last month took over from Dr. Archie Hallett. "The faculty we have is extremely good with the conditions under which we've had to work and with the great variety of students we have.

"Our people have had to be very resourceful, very adaptable, very willing to put up with inadequacies in many respects. So I have no hesitation in saying how proud I am of the work that the college has done and the people in it.'' Dr. Cook, who headed the college's department of Academic Studies from 1976 until 1988 when he became vice president, said overseas universities and employers look to the Bermuda College for potential students or employees, because "they know that the student is going to come out of here with something of value and substance in their hands''.

"That does not happen by luck,'' he added. "That happens because you have people who have taken an interest in students. Obviously, we don't succeed with every student. But because we have a supportive, caring faculty and a caring institution, we actually do get a degree of success with which I think we can be very satisfied.'' Stressing that the college will remain a comprehensive institution "with a mandate in further and higher education'', Dr. Cook said: "We have to do a very broad variety of things which in other jurisdictions would not normally be done in a single institution''.

He said the college has a variety of committees and advisory groups which keep its pulse on the needs of the community in general.

By providing what Bermuda's businesses need, he said, the college also provides what Bermuda's second and growing economic pillar -- international business -- needs.

"But,'' he said, "we also we need the community, generally, to understand that we cannot work miracles.

"We don't have a crystal ball. We don't have the means to know what needs to be done for Bermuda 10 or 20 years down the road. We can only attempt to respond on the basis of the information that we receive to know what is necessary.

"They must understand the constraints under which we can operate. They must understand there are only so many students to go around in Bermuda and the need to extract as much as we can out of what we got.

"We have, sometimes, to try to bring students a very long way in a very short period of time, because for a variety of reasons they don't come to us as well prepared as we would like. And that's natural.

"We don't want to turn any student away. But we cannot accommodate everybody because the programmes we have naturally assume a certain level of achievement. And if students have not previously attained that achievement, we cannot necessarily fill all the voids.

"The extent to which a student is able to take advantage of the programmes that we have so they can go into the international business sector depends fundamentally upon the degree of preparation and level of achievement they have had in school.'' Dr. Cook said while the college does everything possible to help its 650 full-time students, it's role for the part-time student is even greater.

"Students are going to need to educate themselves on a life-long basis,'' he said. "People are out working, situations change, the economy changes, people have to be continually adapting and continually reeducating themselves and that's what our adult and continuing Eeucation is there for. But you can't do what you need to do for the part-timer without the basis, without the facilities, the faculty, the library, and the computer services that we need here for the full-time programmes.

"All of this which is here is not for 650 full-time students,'' he stressed.

"It's for the whole community in fact. For example, members of the public will be able to use the library. It's going to be an academic library for Bermuda.'' While the college has no intention of becoming a university, Dr. Cook said its next logical step will be to develop a hospitality degree.

"We think we will get a significant number of overseas students who want to do this, and of course that means fees,'' he said. "And that will help in the running of the institution.'' Although the college usually gets six to seven percent of the student body from overseas without recruiting, Dr. Cook said he believes it is at the stage where it can begin to recruit overseas students.

"I think we can move to the point where there might be 15 percent (overseas students at the college),'' he said.

"We have not struck a goal as to the number of overseas students that we would like to have here. But obviously, having international students here is beneficial to our students to have the contact with them. It also will help in the running of our institution because just as our students pay the premium when they go overseas, we can do likewise.'' LOSING NO TIME -- Bermuda College president Dr. George Cook.