Student financial aid is one of the most consequential conversations that happens inside a career college — and one of the least understood from the outside.

Alexandra Serengil, Director of Student Accounts at GUS Canada Colleges, and lead financial aid officer for the Ontario Institute of Health and Innovation, has spent nine years inside that conversation. She came to Canada as a language student at ILAC, graduated from George Brown's events planning program, went back to ILAC to help students who looked like her, joined Toronto Film School where she learned the full complexity of provincial and out-of-province funding, and eventually arrived at OIHI — where she describes her work as taking something very complicated and making it navigable for students who are already navigating a great deal.

In this episode of the EdUp Canada Podcast, host Michael Sangster and Alexandra walk through what actually happens when a student walks in the front door of a career college and asks how they're going to pay for this. The admissions conversation. The financial aid consultation. The personal questions. The grant-versus-loan distinction. The early childhood educator grant that opens at 8AM and can close before 8:15. The mid-program touchpoint to make sure students still understand what they've signed up for. And the follow-up call after graduation to remind graduates that the loan doesn't disappear.

It's a conversation about the infrastructure that makes career college possible for students who would otherwise decide it's not for them — and the people doing the work of making that infrastructure make sense.

Judy Cohen opened PEAK College because she ran a care home first.

She watched PSWs arrive from other institutions — trained, credentialed, technically capable — and she knew she could do better. So she did. L'Chaim Retirement Home, a 30-bed dementia-specialized residence with a waiting list that stays long, became the proving ground for a school. Students from PEAK — and from other colleges — do their practicum at L'Chaim. What the staff observe goes straight back into the curriculum. The curriculum informs what happens in the home. It's a feedback loop that has been running, getting sharper, for over a decade.

In this episode of the EdUp Canada Podcast, host Michael Sangster sits with Judy and two of her closest collaborators: Deborah Rothenberg, Director of Operations at L'Chaim and co-founder of Dementia Support, a curriculum program now being delivered to long-term care facilities across the sector; and Einat Sandler Leib, Managing Director of the Memory Loss Foundation and educational innovation consultant at PEAK College.

Together they cover 770 PSW graduates in a single year, a 20-hour AI safety workshop built specifically for PSWs entering home care, a Smart and Safe seminar reaching seniors in retirement homes and community centers across the GTA, and the Moments Café — a social program for people with memory loss and their care partners. And they share the insight that Deborah delivers quietly but clearly: you can teach a PSW to check every box on the list. But kindness, empathy, and appropriate speech? That, you can't buy.

Most career colleges operate inside an office park or a downtown tower. Mississauga Career College operates inside a building that also houses a private school, a museum, a family service center, a food bank — and two churches, one of them so striking it stopped host Michael Sangster mid-sentence when he walked through the door.

Dr. Sherif William, a medical doctor by training who arrived in Canada and found his way into career college education in 2018, now directs the college. It's owned by a not-for-profit charity built specifically to serve newcomers to Canada — and the model shows up everywhere, from a personal support worker program that's graduated nearly 700 students directly into local care homes, to a free tuition policy for students who genuinely can't pay, with every dollar of revenue cycling back into community programs like food banks and orphan support.

In this episode of the EdUp Canada Podcast, Sherif walks Michael through what it actually takes to get a 2,400-hour diagnostic sonography program approved in Ontario — a three-year process derailed midway by a regulatory rule change that sent them back to square one. He explains the college's unusual pre-medical pathway, which guarantees acceptance into four Caribbean medical schools for students who complete two years and hit an 80% success threshold. And he talks about a partnership with ACHEV, a government-funded settlement organization offering low-interest student loans specifically for newcomers training in regulated health programs.

It's a conversation about regulation, community, and what a career college can look like when its mission is community service first and everything else second.

Most people picture a career college student as someone fresh out of high school looking for a fast path to a job. Jason Chu wants you to think again.

As Director of Operations at AAPS College of Health Sciences and Technology — formerly the Academy of Applied Pharmaceutical Sciences, founded in Toronto in 2003 — Jason works with students who already hold bachelor's degrees, master's degrees, and PhDs. Scientists who went through every academic credential the system offers and still couldn't land a job in the field they trained for. Internationally educated medical doctors who practiced for a decade and arrived in Canada to find their credentials didn't transfer. Food science graduates discovering that there's no job title called "biologist" — but dozens of openings in quality control.

AAPS exists to bridge that gap. In this episode of the EdUp Canada Podcast, Jason walks host Michael Sangster through what that actually looks like: a six-to-eleven-month postgraduate diploma program, industry professionals teaching live curriculum, an alumni network of managing directors and VPs who recruit directly from current cohorts, and career services that starts halfway through the program — because three months in, students are already applying for jobs.

He also tells the stories that stay with him: a PhD student who'd lost all hope, hired within three months of starting. A medical doctor who practiced overseas for a decade, companies lining up before he graduated. And a clear-eyed argument for why the career college sector — misconceptions and all — is doing work Canada can't afford to undervalue.

Everyone agrees Canada has a healthcare workforce crisis. Almost no one is looking at it correctly.

Raelynn Douglas — CEO of Rae Soleil Consulting, MBA in health and life sciences, and author of The Billion Dollar Blind Spot — spent years watching the same conversation repeat itself: not enough workers, recruiting from the Philippines, signing bonuses, and a vague commitment to improving staff wellbeing. Her argument is that this is a retention problem masquerading as a recruitment problem, and that no one is calculating what it actually costs.

The math is not subtle. An organization of 5,000 staff with 30% turnover, using a conservative $15,000 replacement cost per person, is leaking $22.5 million every year — scattered across line items, never totalled, never actioned. Gallup calls the global version a trillion-dollar preventable problem. Raelynn calls the Canadian healthcare version a billion-dollar blind spot.

On this episode of the EdUp Canada Podcast, host Michael Sangster brings Raelynn's financial and HR lens into a direct conversation about personal support workers, career pathing, the role of skills training, and what "super PSWs" could look like if we stopped treating the workforce as transactional. Her book is a field guide for healthcare leaders who want the conditions of work to change — and this conversation is a sharp, practical extension of that argument.

Most people think of a career college as a stepping stone. Mina Tadrous, Director of Campus Operations and Student Affairs at the Ontario Institute of Health and Innovation (OHII) in Toronto, sees it differently — he sees it as a turning point.

Mina is a career college graduate himself. He completed a paralegal program at Herzing College during a difficult stretch of his own life, went on to practise as a paralegal, and eventually found his way back to the sector as an employee — spending 12 years helping students do exactly what the college once did for him. In this episode of the EdUp Canada Podcast, host Michael Sangster sits with Mina inside the OHII campus to talk about what that career-changing impact actually looks like in practice.

They cover the college's newly accredited Early Childhood Educator program — one of only a handful in Ontario — and the deliberate investment in a hands-on lab built to industry standard. They talk about the 150 employer partners OHII has built relationships with, what it takes to make a placement turn into a same-day job offer, and why industry is increasingly turning to career colleges to find work-ready graduates. And they have an honest conversation about the challenges facing the sector: regulatory instability, lack of consultation, and the difficulty of planning for the long term when policy can shift week to week.

If you want to understand what's actually happening inside Canada's career college sector right now — from the student experience to the employer relationships to the regulatory pressures — this is the episode.

Canada's healthcare workforce isn't just stretched — it's cracking. And the institutions best positioned to fix it are being overlooked, undersupported, and in some cases, actively undercut by operators running so-called "colleges" that are little more than nursing homes with a logo.

In this episode of the EdUp Canada podcast, host Michael Sangster sits down with Cindy Lidster — a former nursing professor at the University of New Brunswick turned career college founder and president of the New Brunswick Association of Private Colleges and Universities. Cindy saw two things coming in 2014 that nobody wanted to believe: that the future of frontline nursing would be delivered primarily by personal support workers and healthcare aides, and that the future of education delivery was going online. She built her college around both predictions before most institutions had even started the conversation. When the pandemic hit, she was ready.

In this episode, you'll hear what it actually looks like to run a high-standards career college in a province that's quietly building one of the most collaborative relationships between private colleges and government in the country. You'll hear about two women in their early twenties who gave up their home in Scarborough, quit their jobs, and moved to New Brunswick — all to enroll in a PSW program they hoped would lead to permanent residency and a career in care. Their placement partners want to hire them full-time. Cindy is quietly waiting to see how it ends.

You'll also hear about a sector working hard to clean its own house: the site visits that revealed "colleges" operating out of care homes, the association standards being built to mean something beyond a government checkbox, and the LPN training waitlists that are already so long Cindy is drafting a proposal for a third provider in the province.

If you've ever wondered whether skills-based training can genuinely change someone's life — or what it looks like when a province actually gets career college policy right — this episode is a masterclass.

Canada is in the middle of a dental assisting crisis — and most people have no idea. In this special Dental Assistants Recognition Week edition of the EdUp Canada podcast, host Michael Sangster sits down with two of the sector's most respected voices: Cheryl Russell-Julien, Director of Academics and Quality Assurance at a regulated career college and a leader within NACC member institutions, and Tara Fitzpatrick, CEO of the Ontario Dental Assistants Association (ODAA).

Together, they unpack what it actually takes to become a dental assistant through a career college, why over 3,000 dental assistant positions sit vacant in Ontario alone, and why recent changes to federal and provincial training grant funding could make things dramatically worse. You'll hear real stories from the chair — from a dentist in Cornwall who couldn't open his office for three days because his assistant was sick, to students who walked out of career college programs feeling genuinely prepared, career-ready, and connected to a profession for life.

If you've ever wondered whether a short, focused training program can truly launch a meaningful career — or what happens when healthcare workforce pipelines start to crack — this episode is your answer.

On the EdUp Canada podcast, host Michael Sangster speaks with Natalie Marsh, President of the Canadian Dental Assistants Association, to mark Dental Assistant Recognition Week and discuss the essential role dental assistants play in Canada’s oral healthcare system amid growing attention on dental care and the CDCP. Marsh describes significant demand across provinces, growing student interest with waitlists, and persistent shortages tied to retention, fair wages, licensing costs, and maternity leaves and retirements. She explains the one-year, dentistry-focused training pathway, national licensing exam, and province-by-province differences in scope of practice that complicate mobility and drive the need for greater standardization. Marsh shares why the work is rewarding—especially helping patients regain smiles with dentures—highlights posture and adaptability as key skills, and emphasizes advocacy to make dental assisting better understood as a regulated healthcare profession.