Bachelor of Early Childhood Care and Education

The Bachelor of Early Childhood Care and Education is a four-year degree with practicum placements, leading toward BC Early Childhood Educator certification and the leadership tier of the sector.

Coursework covers child development from infancy through school age, curriculum design and emergent practice, observation and documentation of learning, play-based pedagogy, inclusive practice and supporting children with additional needs, infant and toddler care, health safety and nutrition, family and community partnerships, Indigenous perspectives in early learning, and administration and leadership of early childhood programs. Supervised practicum runs across multiple settings and age groups.

The degree exists because the sector has a ceiling problem: a two-year diploma qualifies you to work with children, but the supervisory, policy, program-design and training roles increasingly ask for a degree. For international students there is a further advantage — as a bachelor’s degree it sits outside the PGWP field-of-study restriction that applies to the diploma version of the same subject.

CapU is a fully public teaching university on Vancouver’s North Shore — a Designated Learning Institution (DLI O19280078102) with university status since 2008. Classes are small, faculty teach rather than delegate to assistants, and tuition sits well below the big Vancouver research universities while the credential carries the same public-institution standing.

Its field maps to CIP 13.121 (Early childhood education and teaching). As a bachelor’s degree, graduates are exempt from the November 2024 PGWP field-of-study restriction and may qualify for a Post-Graduation Work Permit of up to three years. Full-time on-campus study and graduation remain the conditions, and final decisions rest with IRCC.