https://nationalpost.com/news/canad...s-hold-university-degrees-and-low-paying-jobs
Just before New Year’s Day, Prince Andrew, the third child of Queen Elizabeth, ushered in 2014 by giving an interview to The Telegraph on one of his favourite subjects: the economy*-crippling surplus of Britons in university.
“Coming out of university there’s a tendency to believe that you’re trained as well as educated, which is not actually true,” he said.
Unlike his studious heir-apparent brother, the 53-year-old prince never attended university, and has recently emerged as a British champion of post-secondary alternatives, urging young U.K. citizens to take up apprenticeships and earn their “spurs in the business world before going to university.”
That way, he said, “you’re going into university as a trained person, you’re not coming out as an untrained person.”
The prince’s remarks are well-timed. After two decades of rapidly rising enrolment, half of British university leavers are unemployed or in low-skilled jobs. According to the country’s business secretary, thousands more are still in school sweating out a degree that is “superfluous” to their chosen careers.
“The idea that in order to be a police officer or a nurse you have to have a degree, I mean, that is just qualification inflation,” Business Secretary Vince Cable told a London conference in November.
The situation is similarly grim in Canada. Fifty-one per cent of Canadian adults achieved “tertiary qualification” — the highest among OECD countries. At the same time, in this ever-expanding pool of degree-holders, Canada also tops OECD rankings for the largest share of these graduates making less than the national median income.
“We are number one when it comes to university and college enrolments, but we are also number one in the number of people with university degrees that live in poverty,” said Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist with CIBC World Markets.
We are number one in the number of people with university degrees that live in poverty
Canadians often complain that a university education is too expensive, too unattainable and too scarce. But in a country plagued by bloated universities, rising degree-holder unemployment and a credentialism arms race that shows no signs of stopping, Canada’s real problem may be too much — not too little — university.
In January of 1980, Alberta’s Allalta Credit Union published a Help Wanted ad in the Edmonton Journal looking for a branch manager. The candidate would oversee assets of $16-million at the institution’s “largest branch,” and would be paid the modern-day equivalent of $60,000 a year.
“Formal secondary education,” read the ad, “would be of great assistance.”
Thirty-four years later, Allalta’s suggestion is downright quaint. A recent wanted ad seeking a manager for Chase, B.C.’s Interior Savings Credit Union, for instance, demands not only a university degree, but two additional certificates.
Even before the economic downturn, the 2006 census showed that as many as one-quarter of young people with bachelor’s degrees were holding down jobs that did not require one.
Faced with these swelling ranks of overeducated baristas and telemarketers, employers apparently started getting picky. Two years ago, the job site CareerBuilder.ca surveyed 415 private-sector hiring managers and discovered that 36% of them had begun hiring university graduates for jobs that once required merely a high school degree.
The overall effect has been to erode the employment and earning potential of a university degree, a document once seen as a surefire ticket to the middle class.
CIBC crunched the numbers in an August report and discovered that the historical advantage degree-holders have held over high school graduates is beginning to narrow, and that “on average, Canada is experiencing an excess supply of post-secondary graduates.”
Getting a master’s degree, oddly, only seems to make things worse. According to the 2011 National House survey, rates of unemployment for holders of master’s degrees were actually higher than those only holding bachelor’s degrees.
Lauren Friese, founder of student-centred job site TalentEgg.ca, explained in an email to the National Post that “a master’s degree can make you less desirable for employers who view you as overqualified, especially if you’ve completed your master’s right after university without having acquired any real-life work experience beforehand.”
Regardless, facing an over-credentialed job market, the response by students has simply been to up the ante.
Year over year, the first decade of the 21st century saw record-breaking enrolment at Canadian universities, and by 2011, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada was proudly announcing it had broken the one million mark for student enrolment. The Canada of 2014 now has more post-secondary students than it has Saskatchewanians.
Ten years ago, in her somewhat gloomy final book Dark Age Ahead, Toronto-based urban thinker Jane Jacobs devoted an entire chapter to what she saw as an erosion of university quality by a culture obsessed with racking up job credentials.
“Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North American universities,” she wrote.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canad...s-hold-university-degrees-and-low-paying-jobs
