All Posts Tagged With: "employment"

British students will soon be able to answer that question

Britain’s government plans to rank universities using graduate employment rates and starting salaries in a bid to “name and shame” programs whose graduates aren’t finding good jobs, reports The Telegraph.

Students who want to pick a degree that will give them better job prospects currently have little to go on, said David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities. He explained that future students “will be able to see [that] ‘if I do biological sciences at one university, I have got a much better chance of a job in a pharmaceutical company than if I do biological sciences at a different university.”

Eventually, a website will allow students to comparison shop by letting them compare tuition rates alongside genuine salary and employment figures. The plan comes after the government faced protests for raising the cap on tuition fees, sending many up to the new maximum of $14,000 per year. (In comparison, average tuition in Canada is $6,500.)

Program-specific salary and employment data is not readily available in Canada. In Ontario, schools must release information on how many students are employed, but there are no details available on whether they’re working in their chosen field — or how much they’re being paid.

That lack of information may have contributed to unrealistic expectations about what students will make five years after starting work. A 2010 survey of 24,000 Canadian students found that university students were expecting an average salary of $70,000 within five years of graduation. In reality, those aged 25 to 30 average $45,000 and those aged 31 to 35 average $51,000.

It may be more than you guessed. Click to see where your school stands.

Professor photo courtesy of Rainer Ebert on Flickr

What does your professor make? Assuming he or she is a full (tenured) professor, it’s probably more than you guessed. The median pay among full professors at 31 Canadian schools is $128,480, according to a recent study.

That said, if your professor is at the University of Northern British Columbia, she likely makes a far less than if she’s with the University of British Columbia. A report by Culture, Tourism and the Centre for Education Studies shows that salaries in the 2009-10 school year followed no apparent pattern. Some highly-ranked schools pay less than not-so-prestigious schools. A few smaller schools — Trent for example — pay profs much better than bigger neighbours. The report presented data from 31 schools. That’s fewer than half of the 81 schools profiled in the Maclean’s Guide to Canadian Universities, meaning this list is far from comprehensive.

It’s worth reiterating that these figures are for full professors only. Assistant professors, associate professors and contract faculty make much less and many academics work for more than a decade before getting full status, if they ever do. Still, these numbers show that professorship is a lucrative career from coast to coast.

Trent – 158,876

Calgary – 154,008

British Columbia – 151,145

Alberta – 145,585

Athabasca – 144,689

McMaster – 144,366

Lethbridge – 144,255

York – 143,091

Wilfrid Laurier – 142,905

Windsor – 141,831

Ottawa – 141,417

Guelph – 139,934

Lakehead – 137,827

Manitoba – 137,765

Brock – 137,666

UOIT – 135,000

St. Mary’s – 129,603

Victoria – 128,122

UPEI – 126,903

Memorial – 126,623

Nipissing – 123,754

New Brunswick – 123,546

St. Thomas – 123,307

Brandon – 117,494

Acadia – 110,000

UNBC – 103,796

Cape Breton – 102,622

Mount Royal – 101,974

OCAD – 101,086

Kwantlen – 84,896

Trinity Western – 78,778

Province reacts with “hard cap” on new enrollments

Photo courtesy of woodleywonderworks on Flickr

Few other graduates in Canada have as much reason for pessimism as those who finished teacher’s college this spring. A study from the Ontario College of Teachers shows that two-thirds (67 per cent) of education graduates from Ontario’s class of 2009 found themselves unemployed or underemployed in the following year. And, the unemployment rate among new teachers has exploded to a staggering 24 per cent — up from just three per cent in 2006.

The job market is bad in western Canada too. In British Columbia, 2,700 new students were certified by the College of Teachers last year. The BC Public School Employers’ Association says that only 1,000 are needed, according to the Victoria Times Colonist. Even in fast-growing Alberta, many school boards are laying off.

The situation has caused Ontario to take an unusual step. In May, it placed a “hard cap” on funding for newly enrolled education students. Caps are usually reserved for medical professions only, but John Milloy, Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities for Ontario, explained that the supply and demand is so out of whack that teacher’s college enrollments needed to be culled.

“We recognize that not every graduate of education programs wants to be a teacher in Ontario,” says the Minister. “But at the same time, we want to make sure that when people leave [teacher's college] they have a realistic chance of getting a job.”

The problem for grads is that Canada has fewer school-aged children, fewer retiring teachers and yet teacher’s colleges have chosen to pump out more grads over the past decade. The new cap in Ontario will force first-year classes to shrink by 885 students overall by 2012-13. That means a maximum of 9,058 new students will start next fall.

But is that enough? The new cap is still far above the 8,077 teachers from Ontario schools who registered with the provincial college in 1999 — a period when an average of 7,200 Ontario teacher’s retired each year, creating many spots for new grads. In the period between 2005 to 2009, average annual retirements fell to just 4,600, meaning thousands fewer jobs per year.

And now? “Teacher retirements are forecast to remain under 5,000 annually over the next seven years,” concluded the College of Teachers’ report. That means the bleak job market for new teachers is unlikely to improve any time soon.

In the U.S., degrees are worth more than ever

Photo courtesy of Ralph and Jenny on Flickr

An article in The New Republic by Kevin Carey starts off with this paragraph.

Sally Cameron thought she had done everything right. After studying French and Arabic at a tony liberal arts college, she knew that graduate school would help her career chances. But when she hit the job market, her Ivy League management degree didn’t seem to matter. The worst recession in decades had pushed the unemployment rate to nearly 10 percent and good jobs were scarce. Sally paid the rent by tending bar and filled her time with volunteer work.

Then, Carey reveals that Cameron graduated in 1980 and that her story was first published in the Washington Post in 1982. His point is that the anecdote could have started off any one of the many recent stories about how students can’t find jobs after graduation.

Worse, he argues that journalists get the story wrong every time — all of them suggest that the value of degrees has declined. In 1976, Harvard University economist Richard Freeman predicted in The Overeducated American that the ever-increasing number of graduates would exert downward pressure on their wages.

In fact, the opposite has proven true. The inflation-adjusted wages of bachelor degree holders in the U.S. grew 34 per cent between 1983 and 2008 and the wages of graduate degree holders grew 55 per cent, despite multiple recessions. Meanwhile, high school dropouts’ wages fell by two per cent over the same period. Carey also points out that despite higher than usual unemployment, graduates were the only members of the U.S. work force whose employment rate has fallen each month since January.

Best paying fields are those dominated by white men

There are major differences in the potential earning power of different majors, according to a new study from The Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University.  Among the 171 bachelor degrees studied, median pay ranged from a high of $120,000 for graduates with petroleum engineering degrees to a low of $29,000 for those who hold counselling psychology degrees.

The study also revealed wide gaps in earnings based on gender and race. The most lucrative majors are those dominated by white men, while the least lucrative are those dominated by African Americans and women. What’s worse, even when they do have the same degree, women and minorities tend to make less than white Americans and men. For example, African-Americans with finance degrees earn an average of $47,000 per year, Hispanics and Asians averaged $56,000 and Caucasians earned $70,000.

Here are the top 10 majors with the highest median earnings:

1. Petroleum Engineer ($120,000)
2. Pharmacy/pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration ($105,000)
3. Mathematics and Computer Sciences ($98,000)
4. Aerospace Engineering ($87,000)
5. Chemical Engineering ($86,000)
6. Electrical Engineering ($85,000)
7. Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering ($82,000)
8. Mechanical Engineering ($80,000)
9. Metallurgical Engineering ($80,000)
10. Mining and Mineral Engineering ($80,000)

Here are the 10 majors with the lowest median earnings:

1. Counseling/Psychology ($29,000)
2. Early Childhood Education ($36,000)
3. Theology and Religious Vocations ($38,000)
4. Human Services and Community Organizations ($38,000)
5. Social Work ($39,000)
6. Drama and Theater Arts ($40,000)
7. Studio Arts ($40,000)
8. Communication Disorders Sciences and Services ($40,000)
9. Visual and Performing Arts ($40,000)
10. Health and Medical Preparatory Programs ($40,000)

Some modest proposals for restoring the grand old qualification.

Pity the poor Bachelor of Arts degree. Once a noble survival of the medieval tradition of scholarship, a tribute to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, the BA is now denigrated as little more than a meaningless couple of letters. The degree is so common, it is now said, that no one with a BA stands out. And even if they did, employers soon learn that a BA graduate doesn’t necessarily have the critical thinking or writing skills that is supposed to justify the degree in the first place. As a result, we are told,  the only function of the BA is as a stepping stone to some other qualification. BA: Begin Again.

To some extent, this vision of the degree is not entirely a bad thing. If you want to be a high school English teacher, it makes sense for you to have a degree in English before getting your teaching training. Similarly, I think a lawyer should have a broad education that includes, say, some philosophy and history, before studying law. Indeed, what’s wrong with a marketing rep knowing something about abstract expressionism?

Still, if the BA itself is meant to confer qualities of mind that can be applied in any field (as I have often argued in this space), then something is surely wrong if employers don’t see the degree as conferring any advantage at all. Moreover, I am prepared to admit that the BA is a degree that one can manage to get through without learning a whole lot. I am a notoriously tough grader, but even in my classes, one doesn’t have to show any real brilliance to manage a D on a paper,  and many students do just enough to get get only that minimal passing grades. After all, why work hard for an A when you end up with the same degree at the end of it all?

The best way to solve these problems would be to provide universities with a lot more money and a mandate to accept fewer BA students. Tuition fees could be drastically cut which would reduce the drive towards mercenary training and allow programs to focus on big thinking skills. Class sizes could be reduced and, not relying on tuition to stay afloat, universities could simply kick out those who did not excel.

But assuming a huge influx of cash is not on the horizon, here are some other suggestions.

1. Universities should be required to institute meaningful minimum average requirements for all degrees. Some do already, but not all. At my august institution for example, there is no minimum requirement for a 3-year arts degree, apart from the 50% needed to pass courses. Requiring, say, a 65% average in courses applied towards the degree would go a long way to ending the practice of scraping by with barely acceptable work. At the same time, university departments would have to take care to ensure that their faculty members continue to hold students to the same standards, and don’t simply award a 65% for work that used to rate a 55%.  Such a move might hurt the bottom line at some places, but once it became clear that a higher standard was required, even mediocre students could manage that middling C.

2. Employers should more routinely ask applicants for copies of their transcripts. Such a practice would help them distinguish between a student who had really excelled and one who had merely endured. Knowing that their records may be viewed in this way, students would have a strong incentive to work harder.

3. All Canadian universities should award Latin honours(cum laude, magna cum laude etc) for degree holders, or some similar distinction for high achievement. Such honours should be based on one’s rank in the program (cum laude for the top 25% and so on), not on grade average since the latter might drive grade inflation. Having a BA summa cum laude would give the degree holder an extra advantage and would encourage all students to work harder to get into the top ranks. Thus even those falling a bit short would still end up with a better education than they might otherwise have received.

Any one of these solutions, widely adopted, might help restore the luster of a degree that deserves better than its current reputation.

Why so many students dream of working for the government

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

It can be lonely for recruiters manning the booths for big banks or retailers at Ryerson University’s student job fairs. “The government agencies get a lot more attention,” says Ian Ingles, the organizer of the Toronto events.

That’s no surprise, considering the statistics. In a recent survey for Studentawards.com, 30 per cent of university students picked the government of Canada as their employer of choice. Then came Health Canada. Provincial governments did well too, beating out all of the banks and the video game developers. Even the trendiest private sector companies, Apple and Google, couldn’t beat the federal agencies.The results echo another recent survey of nearly 10,000 Canadian students by research firm Universum. In it, arts graduates, for example, gave the government of Canada, the provincial governments and Health Canada gold, silver and bronze respectively.

The recession explains some of the zeal for the civil service. During the rough days of 2009, students got the message that private companies were shedding employees while government workers were relatively unaffected: there was a record-setting 4,000 applications for 106 Ontario government internships in early 2009.

But how to explain the post-recession jump in applications for the same internship program? Last March, even with many private sector employers hiring graduates again, applications to the annual program grew by more than 20 per cent to just over 5,000 for 76 spots.

Demographics—and the altruistic goals of new graduates—best explain the march toward public service, says Sandra Botha, a campus recruiter for the government of British Columbia. Modern immigrants to Canada are proud to work for the government, she says. “Many students perceive a government job as having a lot of prestige, because it did in their parents’ country of origin,” she explains. “We have many more Chinese-Canadians applying in B.C., and if you come from China, working for the government is considered the job.”

The government would have been the only job available for Elias Samuel had he stayed in his native Ethiopia, he says. “You don’t really have any other options if you graduate from engineering,” says the 2010 graduate of Brandon University. Samuel fled his country as a refugee after he was threatened by police for demonstrating against the dictatorship. Still, he maintains a strong desire to work in the public sector. He’s even considering a master’s degree in statistics to improve his chances of landing a government gig.

Samuel says working for the government will teach him skills to help change the world. “Canada is a very democratic government and everything works smoothly,” he says. “Maybe if I worked for the government here, then I could one day go back to my country and implement change to the system,” he says.

Botha has witnessed strong altruism among Canadian-born students too. “If we have an external position posted for anything environmental, we have huge numbers of people applying,” she says. “They all want to make a difference to climate change.”

That may explain the growing number of degree programs directed at students with big plans for the planet. Trent University recently accepted the first class of students into its new masters in sustainability studies program, which includes political science courses to prepare students for work in government ministries. The University of Guelph is currently training Canada’s first ever Ph.D.s in international development studies.

David Turpin, the president of the University of Victoria, says more students want to change the world than ever, but he has another explanation for the lure of the government gig: they are successfully fighting the stereotype that the public service is boring, he says. That’s something Ingles, the Ryerson career expert, says he’s noticed too.

Of course, pensions, perks, and job security are nothing to sneeze at. Manvi Kapoor, a soon-to-be human resources graduate of Ryerson University, says the high starting wage was why she applied to the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services two summers ago. The benefits—including life insurance, guaranteed nine-to-five workdays, and plenty of vacation time—are the reasons she’ll go back. There’s no need to re-apply; even summer students have enviable job security.

Kapoor sees one potential snag in her future plans. “People of my generation are really restless to move up quickly,” she says. “But because of the good job security in government, people stay in their jobs 10 years or more before ever making a move.” That could slow things down. “If I want to move up, I’ll have to wait for people to literally die off one by one,” she says.

But which schools are turning out the most employable grads? No one really knows.

When John Mortimer was a young man in the late 1930s in England, he told his father he wanted to study to be an actor. Or—even better!—a writer. His father was not impressed. “My dear boy, have some consideration for your unfortunate wife,” Mortimer senior said. “You’ll be sitting around the house all day wearing a dressing gown, brewing tea and stumped for words. You’ll be far better off in the Law. That’s the great thing about the Law, it gets you out of the house.”

The arm-wrestle over the purpose of a university education is hardly new. Is it to follow your passion, young Mortimer, to wherever that may lead? Or is it to train for a brilliant and lucrative career? What is new, 70 years after the famous son and his father bandied over the breakfast table, is that the debate has become a whole lot more urgent.

Consider the numbers: more than a quarter of a million Canadian university students are about to graduate into the workforce this spring. Yet studies show that 50 per cent of Canadian arts and science grads are working jobs that don’t require a university credential two years after graduation. The average B.A. or a B.Sc. is not trained in any particular skill. And even if they were, potential students and potential employers don’t have any way of knowing which skills a particular degree program teaches. Indira Samarasekera, president of the University of Alberta, says it’s “absolutely critical” that universities track where their grads are working—but very few do. Which schools are turning out the most employable grads? No one really knows.

Continue reading Students want jobs, and universities are listening

Cheap loans and tight job prospects create a new crop of entrepreneurs

After graduating from the University of Western Ontario in 2004, long-time friends Joe Facciolo and Skai Dalziel, both from Barrie, Ont., set off to travel the world. By the time they came home, in 2008, the job market had toughened considerably. “I was looking for work in alternative energy, but nothing really materialized,” says Dalziel, 30. Chatting about their travels, and how hard it was to find a good restaurant in a new city, the two friends were seized by a business idea. “We said, we’re young and we don’t have a lot of responsibility,” Dalziel says. “We figured it was a good time to give it a go.”

That fall, they moved to Whistler, B.C., where they knew the tourism market was strong. By November, Whistler Tasting Tours—which provides guided tours that visit some of Whistler’s best restaurants, providing a multi-course dinner in one evening—was born. “One of the biggest challenges was securing financing,” Dalziel says. “Banks weren’t interested in getting involved.” The Canadian Youth Business Foundation (CYBF), a charitable organization that works with entrepreneurs aged 18 to 34, gave them a $15,000 loan, and Whistler Tasting Tours was profitable within its first year; now they’re talking about branching out to other locations. Running a business, “you’re letting go of your social life,” he says. “But it’s really rewarding.”

Facciolo and Dalziel are two of countless twentysomethings who’ve avoided a more traditional career path, launching their own business instead of working for somebody else. Driven by a tight job market, the number of tools available online, and a growing sense of do-it-yourselfism, entrepreneurship is booming among students and recent grads. And with role models like Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old billionaire founder of Facebook, they’re in good company.

Continue reading Do-it-yourselfism

Ambitious grads find big rewards—in between toys and housewares

Loblaw, Wal-Mart, L’Oréal and Abercrombie & Fitch are lacing up their gloves and pounding banks, hotels and financial service firms in the perennial grudge match to entice the world’s top graduates. They’re the scrappy underdogs going up against the established heavyweight champions, but now they’re employing the same secret weapon that’s been up the sleeves of the other industries for years—manager-in-training programs.

“In an environment where Loblaw is competing with Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, Shoppers Drug Mart and, soon, Target, there’s no room for complacency. It’s a ruthlessly competitive landscape,” says Jeff Muzzerall, director of the Corporate Connections Centre at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “Now is a wonderful opportunity for retail to showcase itself.”

Alix Carter never expected her dream HR job to involve walking the aisles of a grocery store or asking a group of colleagues huddled between rows of frozen pizza and granola bars trivia about the founding of the company. But now, she says, she wouldn’t have it any other way.

“A lot of people might see retail and get scared away,” she says. Grad@Loblaw “showcased an industry that is overlooked by a lot of graduates.”

Continue reading Proud to be retail