The company behind LaSalle College will give birth today to its eighth international baby. It is a brand new building whose construction took seven years and cost the private college $46 million.
“It’s a 20-year-old dream that has come true,” confides Claude Marchand, boss and largest shareholder of LCI Education, about the building which will house a school of 3,000 students and which will be inaugurated in Barcelona, Spain. this week.
The owner of LaSalle College in Montreal also owns seven other buildings in seven countries. In total, LCI has 23 campuses in nine countries.
The Barcelona school already existed, but the 40-year-old entrepreneur dreamed of having his own building, as is the case in Morocco or Colombia.
Fashion, but not only
“It’s our home for the next 100 years, we’ve pulled out all the stops,” enthuses the man who took over the family business in 2020.
With the help of the Caisse de dépôt – which injected 30 to 50 million dollars into LCI Éducation – the 40-year-old entrepreneur has been on a mission ever since. He wants to double the turnover that his father, Jacques Marchand, achieved before his retirement in 2020.
In Montreal, LaSalle College – a private CEGEP – welcomes 5,000 students per year to the city center. Three out of ten customers come from abroad, the rest from Quebec.
Open since 1959, the school has made its reputation in the world of fashion with graduates like designer Marie Saint Pierre, who obtained her DEC in fashion design at LaSalle College in 1986.
LCI Education has diversified in recent years, especially since the arrival of the son at the helm. It offers technical programs in management, video games, computer science and other sectors.
A Quebec student must pay $20,000 for six sessions to obtain their DEC. The same degree costs international students $70,000.
No classroom
For 31 million euros, LCI Education bought a little gem of a building designed by two Catalan architects and built in the Poblenou district of Barcelona.
The timeline was three years before the pandemic hit. It ultimately took seven years to get the school out of the ground.
Four times smaller than the Montreal campus, the Barcelona campus relies on a mix of online courses and physical laboratories.
photo provided by LCI Education
“We don’t have classes, only labs,” explains Claude Marchand, who adds that this was the request from students, accustomed since the pandemic to taking online courses.
The first construction of LCI Education dates back to 1989, when the company purchased its campus on Sainte-Catherine Street, in Montreal.
Barcelona is the eighth city where LCI is building “a house”, indicates Claude Marchand, who wants to make it the “European hub” of its network of private schools.
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