[Trevor3]

Originally Posted by SignalHillHiker

There's not really anything like Sackville or Wolfville here.

In St. John's, the presence of students is highly visible - for example, they account for most of the city's visible minority population and, especially during the winter months, almost every come-from-away. But there's no dominant atmosphere created by students. Most of them are still rural Newfoundlanders and blend in well. When students, say, crowd George Street, it still feels like it's crawling with locals, not visitors.

Corner Brook feels a bit more like a college town given the relative size of the Sir Wilfred Grenfell campus of Memorial University. The fine arts students, especially, seem to have a huge impact on the city's daily life.

Our public college, College of the North Atlantic, has 17 campuses across Newfoundland and one in Doha, Qatar. That can lead to some towns feeling vaguely like college towns. I, for example, studied journalism in Stephenville. Stephenville felt like a college town to me because that was my only connection to it - everyone I met there was from elsewhere in Newfoundland, studying. When we went to a bar like the 104, students from elsewhere were the largest group and set the tone, etc.

But it's (not specifically Stephenville, but CNA campuses generally) lower class, more modern, less established, etc. These towns don't have the weight of a Sackville or Wolfville, and their campuses feel like remote work camps rather than historic universities.

Stephenville recently commissioned a study/plan into developing, as council called it, "the college town concept". A consultant was hired in the fall and I'm interested to see what comes out of it in the end, at the very least we might get something that will help toward developing a proper campus instead of a smattering of buildings and sites all over town and maybe open a couple of new initiatives/routes for economic development.