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FeedHigher Education Soars Higher
Move over, UD and DSU. Delaware’s private colleges are sharpening their public profiles.
by Jim Waltzer Published March 16, 2010 at 08:35 AM
(page 3 of 5)
Wirt says the new psychology program will prepare students for careers in child counseling, substance abuse counseling and human-service work in general. The business world, though, remains Goldey-Beacom’s prime target, and sometimes the feeling is reciprocal.
Many technologies ago, Joe Jones (namesake of the student center) graduated from then-Beacom College. He toiled as a secretary at Coca-Cola, then headquartered in Wilmington, before becoming a senior vice-president. Years later, the widow of longtime Coke CEO Roberto Goizueta enriched Goldey-Beacom’s endowment for the purposes of establishing a scholarship for Latino students in her late husband’s name.
For all prospective students, the college promises an assortment of financial aid packages to parry a substantial chunk of the annual $17,000 tuition. For matriculated students and even former students, Wirt pledges an administration that listens and responds.
“We did a two-year, post-graduate survey and got some wonderful insights,” he says. “Our [programs in] entrepreneurial studies and gender studies came out of that.”
Delaware College of Art and Design
A New Look and Attitude for a City
As Wilmington strengthens its core, Delaware College of Art and Design helps to shape its aesthetic. Housed in a beautiful art deco building at Sixth and Market streets, the 13-year-old school has been grooming a new generation of artists and dispatching them to enliven the look of the city.
“I feel that our students are a great asset to Wilmington,” says DCAD president Stuart Baron, a board member of Main Street Wilmington. “It’s a remarkable opportunity for an arts school to be part of a downtown revitalization plan.”
Along with neighbors such as Delaware History Museum (in the former Woolworth store) and the long-languishing Queen Theater, which will soon get new life as a venue for World Café Live, DCAD is center stage in the downtown revival. Within a building of striking lines, golden Aztec-styled elevator doors evoke 1950s boardrooms, and student displays adorn corridor walls on upper floors. At ground level, the Toni and Stuart B. Young Gallery exhibits student, faculty and outside work for public view.
Across Sixth Street stands the college-owned Saville Apartments, formerly Wilmington’s iconic Mullin’s Department Store, which was converted to residences in the 1980s. Many of DCAD’s 220 full-time students bunk at The Saville. The Copeland Student Center occupies the first floor.
Baron gives high marks to his instructors for both professional achievement and motivational teaching. “Students benefit from the spirit of discovery,” he says. More than 80 percent of students who earn the two-year associate’s degree of fine arts from DCAD go on to pursue a bachelor’s degree, most of them at Pratt Institute (Brooklyn and Manhattan) and Corcoran College of Art + Design (Washington, D.C.), two prestigious schools that came to town in 1996 and helped launch DCAD.
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