Offering a variety of programs including a bachelor’s degree in Health Care Management, Business Administration, and the newly introduced Human Resources Graduate certificate, the Donald School of Business in downtown Red Deer has provided Red Deer College students with plenty of opportunities in the midst of some of the local leaders in the business community.

Those connections made it a no-brainer for RDC to extend their lease at the Donald School of Business for another ten years.

President and CEO of RDC Joel Ward says with degree granting status recently approved for the college earlier this spring, this gives the Dean of the Donald School of Business an opportunity to look at future program development.

“Becoming a University means that we will be going forward with a number of new programs in the school of business, including our own degrees in business. So you can imagine a bachelor’s degree in commerce, you can imagine a lot more specialities like finance, like accounting, like human resource management, like international business, like logistics.”

Ward explains why they moved this business school to the Millennium Centre in downtown Red Deer back in 2011.

“We believe that having a school of business downtown, closer to where most of the senior banking, finance, and oil and gas leaders in Red Deer, a lot of their offices are downtown, so it puts students closer to the action, and it also enables downtown business people to just step out of their office, come into class, and talk to students about the future of business.”

The Donald School of Business currently has about a thousand students, but Ward says it has the potential to double in the next ten years as they make the journey to becoming a university.

They plan to roll out a dozen or so new programs in the next year, as well as opening the Gary W. Harris Games Centre in the fall, and they are in the middle of preparing to host events for the 2019 Canada Winter Games.