The High North Tour 2021: “This Education Program is Extremely Important for Business in the North”

These are the words of Jørund Greibrokk, Deputy Head of Institute at UiT Alta Business School. He talks about his 1,600 students who long before the pandemic hit universities could follow the program from their “home offices”.

The pandemic changed little or nothing for the students at Alta Business School.

The 1,600 students constitute some ten percent of all students at the University of Tromsø.

“About half of our students come from Northern Norway, but these are not “taken” from campus students. They rather come in addition. There are for instance engineers, nurses or police who need further education in economics or management as a foundation for furthering their career. They are our typical student, Greibrokk says to High North News.

50 percent northerners

Out of the remaining students at UiT Alta, some 20 percent come from Central Norway and the rest, some 30 percent, come from South Central Norway.

“We have grown very digital. We started softly back in 2007, when we in reality were forced to provide some of our teaching digitally as we did not have capacity enough to cover the urgent demand out there. This grew rapidly. We remodeled one program after the other, for which recruiting locally had been hard, to become web based and applications soared”, Jørund Greibrokk says.

This also means that you are perhaps not so much affected by the pandemic?

“On a general level, I would argue that we are probably the professional community and institute that has been the least affected by the pandemic. We have in many ways just seen confirmation that what we have done has been right all along”, Greibrokk says.

Watch the entire interview with Jørund Greibrokk on top of this page. (Subtitles available in English.)

This article was originally published in Norwegian and has been translated by HNN's Elisabeth Bergquist.