When my 17-year-old son joined the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, the union representative mentioned that he had seen several men with one or even two university degrees, who had decided they wanted to be carpenters. Instead of toiling at menial, low-paying jobs, they’re abandoning ivory-tower dreams and building the towers.
Was there anything beyond the rep’s observation that a university degree is not necessarily a key to the future, and instead, a trade might open doors? Are too many high-school graduates choosing university, based on parents’ desires, peer pressure, pop culture and the push by school counsellors? Or do students dismiss the work done by bakers, boilermakers and bricklayers?
As university students worry about their heavy debts after four or more years of school, or fret that they’ll always be a substitute teacher instead of a full-time educator, perhaps it’s time to rub some of the gloss off the master’s degrees and PhDs.
Ken Coates, a Canada Research Chair in Regional Innovation at the University of Saskatchewan, is writing a book about the over-expansion of the global university system and the reality of post-graduate opportunities. His research has found that within one year after graduation, 15 per cent of bachelor of arts graduates in Canada sign up for community college courses.
As well, 30 per cent of students who start university in Canada don’t graduate, because they’re not good enough or because their parents have pushed them to university, a place they don’t want to be.
In the U.S., where university tuition is substantially more, half of the students who start a degree finish, and of that 50 per cent, half get a job in their chosen field. In Ontario, only 20 per cent of people with education degrees get jobs as teachers.
“People feel used by universities,” Coates told me. “There’s a very substantial movement of people with degrees who become bus drivers or carpenters.” He thinks a maximum of 25 per cent of high school graduates should attend university.
Still, people remain enamoured with a university degree because of the prestige, belief in the knowledge economy and perception that someone who works in the trades is of a lower class.
Tell that to Coates’s friend who earned a business degree and hated it. He became a cabinet maker and now earns $100,000 a year building high-end home fixtures.
In Ottawa, Robert South, director of public policy for Polytechnics Canada, said that of the roughly 232,300 full-time students enrolled in the association’s 11 member schools, 13 per cent have a bachelor’s degree, up from seven per cent five years ago.
To help high-school graduates choose the right career, not one that is supposedly more “important,” South said Polytechnics Canada has been working to raise the cachet of trades jobs.
In Canada, there are 57 Red Seal trades. It usually takes a student four years to meet national standards before earning a Red Seal in anything from cook or hairstylist to landscape horticulturist or motorcycle mechanic. The attractive aspect of Red Seal training is that students work and earn good money during their apprenticeship and attend school only part of the time.
South says students should choose a career based on their abilities, future job prospects and training opportunities. But that’s a difficult balancing act, because Canada lacks solid labour-market data. Matching supply and demand is a challenge, particularly over the future, and without that data, there’s a danger the market could be flooded with plumbers or shocked by the number of electricians.
In Alberta, where the swift rise in unemployment came as a surprise, polytechnics and colleges are experiencing a bump in enrolment as unemployed oilpatch workers begin retooling. How fast an institution can respond to demand is crucial.
It can be done, as proven by the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, which developed a construction management program just four months after industry asked for such a course.
South and Coates are university graduates. Even the union representative, a Red Seal carpenter, has a social-work degree. Of course there is a need for people with university degrees. And there’s something to be said for having a job that you love. But it’s folly to choose a career based on unrealistic aspirations or the glamour factor, and without honestly assessing your own abilities.
I’m glad my son, who is apprenticing with a Red Seal carpenter, didn’t decide he’d follow in his mother’s footsteps and get a journalism degree. He has only been working a month, and already he’s earning more than I do.
