The new president of Bermuda College yesterday vowed to work with staff to improve student success - starting with those in remedial classes.

Dr. Michael Orenduff, who joined the college on a three-year contract, told the media that he and lecturers would start setting targets for improvement from this autumn and promised that all results would be made public from year to year.

The American college administrator said the first target he wanted to set involved those students on catch-up courses, because he suspected many were not obtaining adequate grades at the end of their remedial classes.

And he said action would need to be taken almost immediately to stop remedial students losing heart or dropping out.

But he promised that during his three-year reign all students would be treated equally and all would be given every opportunity to succeed, no matter how long it took or what their background.

Dr. Orenduff said: "I will be going to the board this fall and suggesting to them a target for increasing our success with remediation. Next year I will move that target up."

But he said there would be many more targets on the way.

Dr. Orenduff said Bermuda College had to provide everything to everyone on the Island. Where it could not do that alone, he said it must have the partnerships and contacts in place overseas to ensure it catered for all the needs of students and businesses on the Island.

He said all colleges had one thing in common - "an almost impenetrable resistance to change".

But he said Bermuda College was among those that was leading the way in loosening the stranglehold on tradition, by making itself more responsive to stakeholders, instead of trying to produce intellectual clones.

And he said student success must become the cornerstone of everything that happens at Bermuda College.

He added: "At present, our attrition rate is entirely too high. But we have talented faculty and staff who can turn that around.

"We need better internal communication and more participative governance. We need to give our people the tools they need to succeed. In some cases, that may mean more professional development or better equipment. In some cases, it may mean little more than getting out of their way.

"Let me re-emphasise that our Board of Governors has charged us with being responsive to our stakeholders.

"Clearly, we cannot do that if our primary stakeholders - our students - are failing.

"We will listen to what the larger community needs and to what students want, and we will respond with programmes and courses that provide Bermudians with the education they need for the lives they want."

Dr. Orenduff said the college, and its focus on outcomes, differed substantially from the traditional universities.

He said universities rated themselves by inputs, such as the test results of their incoming students, the dollars in their endowments, the number of books in the libraries, and the number of Nobel Laureates on their faculty.

However, he said none of those things made any difference to the success rate if the students spent their time partying, books went unread, and the Nobel-winning faculty rarely taught undergraduate classes.

He added: "At Bermuda College, we may never have a world-class library or a faculty member who wins the Nobel Prize, but we will be able to demonstrate student success.

"I will propose the use of exit exams to demonstrate objectively that students who leave Bermuda College have achieved a high-quality education. Now, Harvard will never do that.

"They (Harvard) don't have to worry about what their students know, because they don't let anyone in who doesn't already know it.

"To give it its due, Harvard is, in many ways, a kind of national treasure for my country, but it is also like a hospital for well people.

"A hospital that doesn't admit seriously ill people will have a high cure rate. A university that doesn't admit struggling students will, likewise, have a high success rate. But it's a hollow success.

"Can you imagine going to hospital and being told `sorry, you are too sick to be admitted - come back when you are feeling better?"

"That is what a university says when it refuses to admit students. Bermuda College needs to adopt a different philosophy. We should admit any student who is serious about learning. Of course, that means we will have to provide extra help. We may require many students to take remediation, but it is where they end up that counts, not where they start out.

"That is why we will measure our quality by outcome."