Canada | Some 40 pc of Canadian university graduates aged 25 to 29 are employed in low-skill jobs

Canada’s skills gap has been brought into increasing focus by the large numbers of unfilled jobs which coexists with high youth unemployment.

Last summer, a report commissioned by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives stated that Canada is falling behind in the global skills race. The answer, according to many university presidents, is more money to produce more graduates. But what if Canadian universities were the root cause of the skills gap, rather than the solution? There’s considerable evidence to support this conclusion.

While universities like to trot out statistics showing that their graduates have higher rates of employment than people without post-secondary education, they deliberately fail to report what portion of those graduates find work that requires a university education.

An OECD survey provides that information: Some 40 per cent of Canadian university graduates aged 25 to 29 are employed in low-skill jobs, second worst rating out of the 11 countries surveyed. That bachelor of arts in history or philosophy just isn’t of much use to a barista at Starbucks.

Failure to find work utilizing their university learning has driven a huge increase in BA graduate enrolment in jobs-focused colleges. For taxpayers, this means paying for a costly but practically useless university education program and then paying again for the college program…

Choosen excerpts by JMM from

via Gwyn Morgan: Lack of saleable skills causes real inequality | The Province.

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