Posted Dec. 30, 2007:
Academic disengagement is likely to exacerbate a second aspect of this crisis – underemployment. Some underemployment is structural in the sense that there are simply not enough jobs for our university graduates. In the 1990s, according to Statistics Canada, our universities produced some 1.2 million grads, but only about 600,000 jobs were created during that decade that required that level of credential. Currently, we have about one million students in the system. If the job creation pace of the 1990s remains the same, we will have several hundred thousand grads each year pursuing fewer than 100,000 job openings. This could increase the structural underemployment rate from the 50% level found in the 1980s and 1900s to about 75%.
While these university graduates are less likely to be unemployed, it is because they take jobs requiring lower levels of education, leaving the hapless high school and community college graduate in an even worse predicament than was the case before so many began taking the university route to compete for entry-level positions. This predicament is referred to as the “downward cascading effect” of credential over-production.
At the same time, some underemployment is personal, rather than structural, created by students who drift through secondary and universities with little required of them, and who therefore have learned little that would qualify them as “highly skilled” in the job market. These graduates have not acquired the type of human capital skills that are believed to stimulate economic productivity and growth. In fact, according to a report published by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada almost one in five university graduates now works in a low-skilled job. The presence of, and tolerance by universities for, disengaged students helps explain the low level of function literacy of many university graduates, along with the fact that some university graduates take jobs alongside high school graduates. In their book Who’s Not Working and Why Fredric Pryor and David Schaffer provide extensive statistical evidence that American university graduates in jobs requiring high school credentials have lower levels of functional literacy.
In the end, the more graduates we produce with a history of academic disengagement, the less they will benefit personally and financially, and the less likely they will contribute to the national economy beyond what a high-school graduate would add. Meanwhile, the liberal arts programmes that are increasingly bloated by academically disengaged students will continue to decline in quality, and their promise of expanding bright minds will continue to fade. If Canada is to stand by its claim of being a world leader in higher education, and if it hopes to maintain its global competitiveness, reforms are needed in both our secondary schools and universities.