Canada / Higher Education reduces youth unemployment

Youth unemployment has been the scourge of much of the developed world throughout the recession and recovery, but the data show that higher education may be the greatest antidote for this economic toxin. Fortunately, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development finds, Canada’s young work force has profited from one of the strongest education systems in the industrialized world.

The OECD’s new report, Education at a Glance 2013: OECD Indicators, found that 51 per cent of adult Canadians had some sort of post-secondary educational qualification as of 2011, up a massive 11 percentage points since 2000. That rate of post-secondary education is tops in the 34-country OECD, where the 2011 average was 32 per cent.

For those who still think university degrees are an expensive ivory-tower navel-gazing waste of time (and after spending seven years on various campuses, I admit there were times I would have agreed), the hard statistical facts suggest that higher education has been a fantastic defence against the unemployment line. Across all OECD countries, people with post-secondary education (or “tertiary,” as the OECD prefers to call it) had an unemployment rate of 4.8 per cent in 2011; for those who hadn’t completed their secondary education, it was 12.6 per cent. And the gap widened substantially during the recession; the unemployment rate for the highly educated rose just 1.5 percentage points from 2008 to 2011, versus 3.8 percentage points for those with low education levels.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at 

via Education the antidote for youth unemployment – especially in Canada: OECD – The Globe and Mail.