According to a recent survey of what jobs are in demand, and what students are studying in university, many, if not most, of today’s university students are spending good money — probably borrowed money at that — to get themselves a university degree that will prove essentially useless to them the instant they graduate. As Ontario’s manufacturing sector has evaporated, the economy has become such that new graduates have basically three options — a highly skilled professional career (including, perhaps, learning a trade), a low-paid job in the service industry or working for the government. And if you haven’t been paying attention, that last option isn’t looking so hot these days. So what is the smart kid, in their late teen or early 20s, to do? Sadly for them … not what they are doing.
A report by the Toronto Region Research Alliance finds that many students in Canadian universities go into their post-secondary education with hopes of a career in medicine or business. But in the Toronto region, there are only limited spots available for those jobs — and way too many graduates coming out every year, looking for work. For example, the report estimates that in 2012, there will be 6,531 new jobs available for graduates with business and commerce degrees, to be fought over by almost 16,000 graduates. It’s even more lopsided for medicine — barely 3,000 new jobs are forecasted for the current year. Almost 11,000 students will graduate with relevant degrees. Graduates from teacher’s colleges are also having a hell of a hard time finding any open positions. And keep in mind, estimates for the average level of education debt held by Canadian students upon graduation hover around $27,000 each.
Meanwhile, Toronto will need almost 10,000 IT specialists this year. Less than 4,00 will graduate.
Given how slowly the economy is growing, and the pressure being felt by health-care budgets, these medicine and business grads are unlikely to be snapped up any time soon. So if we can’t address the demand issue, why not go after supply? A great place to start would be giving every student who goes into university, or post-secondary education, a mandatory reality check. Instead of Frosh Week, we can call it Future Debt-Ridden Unemployment Week.
Mandatory classes, say in the final year of high school, about student debt, the costs of an education and how long it takes to pay off those debts, given reasonable compensation in their preferred field, would be a great place to start. This would let students make informed decisions about the value of an education — not the fluffy emotional value of making new friends and discovering the joys of binge drinking, but the literal value — how much financial return they can reasonably expect to make on their investment of tens of thousands of dollars.
Employment figures like the ones in the Toronto Region Research Alliance report are a good place to start such a conversation, but then there’s also what the B.C. Securities Commission found last year. Their report showed that Canadian students entering into post-secondary education have wildly unrealistic expectations of what their short-term income potential will be. The average estimate made by these students as to how much they’ll be making within 10 years, when they’re in their late twenties, was $90,000. The actual median income figure for that age group is barely a third of that — $31,648 per annum.
During the Occupy Toronto movement, I met with a lot of young adults, who did not meet the typical stereotype of the left-leaning protester. Many told stories of having always followed the best advice of people they trusted — parents, teachers, guidance counsellors — only to find themselves overeducated, underexperienced, with no job prospects and mounting bills. They felt betrayed, and that was driving their anger. In that, they had a point. And just last week I spoke to a group of university students who will soon be graduating. They are realizing now that their arts degrees might not be enough to land a job, but they’re already paid for. Perhaps this explains the rising trend of Canadian college courses for a particular skill or trade being attended by students who have already paid for a university degree that gave them no competitive edge in the job market.
Individual circumstances will always count for a lot in getting ahead in life. And individual responsibility for one’s development is still the most important ingredient for success. But we owe it to the youth of today to make sure they have the knowledge and financial planning tools to make good decisions about their future before they embark on the expense, in both time and money, of pursuing a university career that turns out to be a path straight to the closest unemployment office.