All Posts Tagged With: "jobs"
Is film school for suckers?
Job prospects are dismal, but applications keep going up
Photo courtesy of Vancouver Film School
Film students are often the butt of jokes about never being able to find a job. Yet this hasn’t deterred people from applying, even now, when job prospects are as dismal as ever.
The number of students taking on film and television majors has skyrocketed in the U.S. The University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts — which only accepts 300 students each term — saw applications jump from 2,800 to 4,800 in a single year, writes the New York Times.
It’s a similar situation in Canada. Since 2006, the prestigious Vancouver Film School has had nearly 8,000 applicants for its 13 programs. The University of British Columbia says it gets an average of 75 applicants annually for a mere 20 spots in its film production program. And get this — York University in Toronto gets up to 17 applicants per spot for its film programs.
But a weak economy has caused many studios and production companies to scale back on staff. “It’s becoming an increasingly flooded marketplace,” Andrew Dahm, who holds a masters degree from U.S.C., told the Times. “Working as an assistant for six years is not unheard of.”
The shallow pool of film-related job postings online reveals a shortage here too. Many job titles applicable to a film graduates have no postings at all. Of the two postings under “video editor” on Workopolis.com, one was for an unnamed company editing wedding footage. A search of the word ‘film’ on Monster.ca brings up only five positions, one of which is an unpaid internship. True, these sites only represent a fraction of jobs, but it’s discouraging nonetheless.
Still, some film educators are optimistic about their students’ futures — just not in film.
“[The] majority of students majoring in film and television will not be having careers in those professions,” Stephen Ujlaki, Dean of Loyola Marymount’s School of Film and Television, told the New York Times. But film training leaves students with business savvy and other skills, he says.
As a student working on a film minor at the University of Manitoba, I have evidence that he’s right. As much flack as I’ve gotten from friends about my capricious minor, film training has proven to be an asset when applying for jobs in another field — journalism. Nearly every publication seems to want to expand its multimedia content and one of those publications, a newspaper, hired me this summer. The time management, organization and communication required on film sets apply to many other jobs
So, it may be true that most film school graduates aren’t going to work on big budget blockbusters or screen their films at Sundance. But that shouldn’t discourage those who truly love film from pursuing a degree in the field. Their time will not be wasted. I can personally attest to that.
Summer job market improves
But some students fare better than others
Photo courtesy of EthanLong on Flickr
Unemployment for 17 to 19 year-old students in Canada is 2.2 per cent lower this June than it was last June, down from 16.0 per cent to 13.8 per cent, reports Statistics Canada.
But older students, those 20 to 24 years old, aren’t having a much easier time finding jobs this summer than last summer. Their unemployment rate remains unchanged from twelve months earlier at 11.0 per cent.
Still, Canadian youth face much lower unemployment than other countries. As of last month, the youth unemployment rates were 29 per cent in Italy, 32 per cent in Ireland, 24 per cent in Sweden, 20 per cent in the United Kingdom and 44 per cent in Spain.
Statistics Canada collects data specifically about students who are planning to return to post-secondary studies in the fall in its Labour Force Survey from May to August.
Are unpaid internships legal? The confusion continues
Even employment counselors don’t understand the rules
Photo courtesy of USDAgov on Flickr
University career counselors in the United States don’t understand what constitutes a legal internship, according to a new survey of 427 of them.
Nearly a fifth of those surveyed believe that interns must always be paid or else their work is illegal. That’s not true. Another fifth believed that internships are always legal, regardless of whether there’s academic credit awarded. That’s also not true.
The standard in both the U.S. and Canada is as follows. If someone receives academic credit from a college or university for their work placement, it’s assumed that the experience is primarily educational and therefore they don’t need to be paid. But if a so-called intern is not in school, the organization isn’t a non-profit, and/or they’re replacing a regular employee, the job is considered a job like any other — the minimum wage laws apply. Read more about the rules and the backlash against unpaid internships, right here.
Regardless of the rules, college counselors overwhelmingly agree that internships are valuable and don’t think students should be too concerned with pay. More than 80 per cent think a student should take an unpaid internship if they can’t find a paid one and only 11 per cent think that all interns should be paid for their work.
1,000 new jobs. Only 300 grads to fill them
Worker shortage makes this career a sure bet (for now)
Photo courtesy of jimmyharris on Flickr
During the 2008 recession, mineral prices dropped and mines stopped hiring. Back then, geology graduates and mining engineers had reasons to worry about their career choices.
Not anymore. Three years later, there are at least 1,000 openings at Canadian mines — and only 300 people are expected to graduate from Canadian mining-related programs this year.
Hani Mitri, a professor of Mining Engineering at McGill University, told the Montreal Gazette that Canadian companies are desperate for geologists, mining engineers, metal workers and environmental experts and that “[Schools] are not prepared for the boom.”
However, some schools are reacting to the changing job market. Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont. announced last week that it will open a new School of Mines, which will mean adding more mining-related programs and courses.
Students in U.K. and Canada overestimate earnings
What do graduates make in Canada? It’s less than you think.
Canadian students consistently over-estimate their future pay — but at least they are not alone.
In Britian, a new study has found that four out of five graduates were earning $48,000 or less in 2010. Only seven per cent made more than $64,000. The study included 22,000 people who finished university between 2000 to 2010. That’s far lower than what they expected to be making, reports Times Higher Education.
That overconfidence echoes a survey of 24,000 Canadian students that was co-authored by Sean Lyons of the University of Guelph in 2010. He and his fellow researchers found that soon-to-graduate Canucks expected to be making an average of $70,000 within five years of graduation.
Data from Statistics Canada (via Lyons’ blog) shows that most people never make it to $70,000 per year. Graduates aged 25 to 29 made an average of $45,000 in 2010, those aged 30 to 34 made an average of $51,000 and salaries were highest for those in their early 50s, at an average of $59,000.
Two-thirds of new teachers can’t find full-time work
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.
Google will hire 4,000 to 5,000 arts grads next year
Arts grads can make great programmers: VP
What can you do with an arts degree? How about work for Google, arguably the world’s most successful tech firm. Google vice-president of consumer products, Marissa Mayer, recently told Times Higher Education that most new hires over the next year won’t be engineers or science graduates. “We are going through a period of unbelievable growth and will be hiring about 6,000 people this year – and probably 4,000-5,000 from the humanities or liberal arts,” she said, adding that Google wants people from any background so long as they’re “smart and get things done.” Many of the arts graduates will be hired for technical jobs, even programming, which many arts graduates excel at, said Mayer.
Women graduates expect to make less money
Is the pay gap a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Female university graduates expect to make a lot less money than their male counterparts, according to a new study of 23,000 Canadian university students that will be published in the journal Industrial Relations. Women predicted that their starting salaries will be 14 per cent lower than their male counterparts had predicted and expected to make 18 per cent less five years later. In reality, university-educated women make 32 per cent less than men in Canada, according to a press release from the University of Guelph. One explanation is that the pay gap is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Women might not be as aggressive in contract negotiations as men, because they’re aware that other women make less, suggests Guelph business professor Sean Lyons, who conducted the study with Linda Schweitzer of Carleton University and Ed Ng of Dalhousie University. Another explanation is that women are inherently more realistic; the study bears this out, as women’s expectations were much closer to reality. A third possibility is that women are less concerned with big paycheques. “It may be that women expect to trade off higher salaries for preferences in lifestyle,” said Lyons. After all, the study found that women and men have equal self-efficacy. Whatever the explanation, Lyons says that all post-secondary students need access to better salary data.
Forget your degree, get a McJob
McDonald’s executive calls for end to education ‘snobbery’
Head of McDonald’s British division Jill McDonald called for an end to education ‘snobbery’ that leads many employers to favour graduates over those with less education at a conference last week, reported The Guardian.
During a talk for the Institute of Directors’ annual conference, McDonald said that many businesses were missing out on a huge pool of talent because they fail to see past academic credentials, and that some youth may be better off in the workforce than pursuing a degree.
“We need to acknowledge the road many young people take today may not be the one we took in the past,” McDonald said.
“We need to remove the snobbery that does down workplace learning. For many put off by high fees, this could and should be the route they take.”
She said that companies such as McDonald’s offer “not just jobs but careers”, pointing out that over half of the fast-food company’s executive team started out at as trainees flipping burgers.
McDonald stressed that she was ‘definitely’ not saying that people should not go to university. “I am definitely not saying that people shouldn’t go to university if they have the opportunity to do so but I do believe it might not be the route for everyone” she said, according to Financial News.
Job interview? Here are some hints
When they say… ‘Tell us about yourself,’ they don’t really mean it
Gregg Blachford, director of career planning at McGill University, says the winning formula for job interviews is to “know yourself, know the employer, and make the match.”
Know yourself: This is what prevents you from falling into stream-of-consciousness mode when asked, “so… tell me about yourself.” Nobody wants to know where you grew up and nobody’s interested in where you graduated from—they already gleaned those details from your resumé. That approach is akin to trying to sell a vacuum cleaner by reading the instruction manual out loud. Instead, talk about what makes you different from the tens, if not hundreds, of other qualified recent grads. The secret here is the old literary adage, “show, don’t tell.” For example, telling your interviewers that you are “very organized,” says Blachford, will only elicit a vacant stare. Instead, offer an achievement: “When I was president of the economics club, I cut costs by reorganizing the archives.”
Another human-resources favourite question is: “What is your greatest weakness?” One way to dodge the greatest-weakness bullet is to talk about a shortcoming you’ve beaten. Mark Barry, vice-president of human resources at Earl’s Restaurants, says his favourite response came from a candidate who admitted to flunking calculus in university, but hired a tutor, took the class again, and passed. It showed resilience. He was hired.
Do-it-yourselfism
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.
Education won’t create more jobs
Michael Ignatieff ignores the fact that there are already too many people with degrees
If you’ve been reading the funnies lately, and by that I mean the political pages, you know that the Liberals and Conservatives have been squabbling over the issue of corporate tax cuts.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and his band of brothers set out Wednesday to peddle the merits of “tax relief for job creators,” while Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff announced his pledge to roll back corporate tax breaks to 2010 levels if elected and instead invest in education. “We think the way to create jobs is invest in post-secondary education and help small and medium enterprises to become more competitive and take on more workers,” he said during a scrum.
If you ask the Conservatives, reducing corporate taxes will stimulate business investment, thereby encouraging growth and competition. According to Jack Mintz, head of the public policy school at the University of Calgary, the tax cut from 16.5 per cent to 15 per cent will generate an estimated $30-billion in investment funds and 102,500 new jobs over seven years. However, according to the Liberals and some labour economists, Canada’s corporate tax rates are already internationally competitive. They argue that the cut will hurt Ottawa’s bottom line and will not necessarily amount to real long term benefits–which is a fair point, in my opinion.
But while Ignatieff’s pledge might spawn warm fuzzies in the hearts of students and professors, it is misleading in several ways.
The idea that pumping more money into post-secondary education is a way to create more jobs ignores a fundamental condition of unemployment among new grads in Canada. While American president, Barack Obama pitched the same idea during his State of the Union address, the educational barriers in this country aren’t nearly as dire as they are the U.S. in terms of financial responsibility. Contrary to what some blue-in-the-face placard-pumpers might tell you, if you want a post-secondary education in Canada and you’re bright enough to pass a few tests, you can probably get one. The number of university enrollments has been steadily increasing over the past several years, meaning more and more individuals are getting post-secondary degrees. Therefore, the problem in Canada is not a poorly-funded system resulting in a lack of access, but rather, a surplus of educated people.
This surplus means that there is increased competition for jobs. A Statistics Canada study looked at university graduates in 2001 and found that nearly one in five worked a job that required a high school education at most. Many other grads nowadays still struggle to find work in their fields. Take teaching, for example. In 2010, the Globe and Mail reported that while about 6,500 new jobs for teachers becomes available in Ontario annually, the Ontario College of Teachers certified 12,774 new teachers in 2008, and another 9,100 in 2009. That’s a lot of competition for a few coveted positions.
You’re hired, Johnny!
Summer jobs, nepotism, and other unfair discrimination.
First year has finished, too quickly for comfort, and the search for a decent summer job is by now long over for those smart enough to have begun it back in January. Those who have left it to the last minute are likely destined for pizza places and dish pits. Unless, of course, one is lucky enough to reap the rewards of nepotism, that power of connection that lands the otherwise unspectacular candidates coveted internships and other plum positions.
My own summer job is at least partially the result of a personal connection, as are the jobs of many of my friends. To find summer work in the Federal Department of Justice or at Canada’s High Commission to the UK, to name a couple examples, is next to impossible for the average 18-year-old first-year student without personal connections.
Is it fair that someone who, completely by chance, is born to a powerful family, should be afforded more opportunities than someone who is born to poor parents? Even if it isn’t fair, is it even possible to overcome, to control, to enforce equality over nepotism?
On a grander scale than the student summer job market, recent conversations with some of my more socially conscious peers have illuminated the deeply entrenched and often subconscious nature of unfair discrimination in our society.
For instance, one study, which followed more than 300 participants throughout their lives from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, found that “attractive adults are more able to procure aid from bystanders, they often have greater social influence, and they are favored in the job market and in the criminal justice system.” Once hired, attractive men and women have also been found to make more money, while income inequality between men and women is a well-known problem of discrimination.
Systematic discrimination against immigrants is another well-known phenomenon. One survey focusing on the experience of Latin American MBA graduates in the Canadian job market found that “75 percent of the respondents referred either to a general and unspecified sense of differential treatment due to not being Canadian or to the perception of different treatment based on accents or lack of Canadian experience.” Of course, discrimination against Hispanics in the United States is much more explicit, as demonstrated by the recent conviction of a 19-year-old Rhode Island man who killed an Ecuadorian immigrant while engaging in the widespread activity of “Mexican hopping,” which is essentially hunting for Hispanics to assault.
A University of Toronto economist found further support for the trend of discrimination in hiring processes when he sent out more than 6,000 resumes to Toronto-area employers. On some resumes, he changed the last name to an Asian sounding name and left all the qualifications the same. He found that resumes with non-Asian sounding names were 40 per cent more likely to be called in for an interview.
Such are the challenges facing pretty much everyone except good-looking white guys, apparently. Reaping the sweet fruits of nepotism is one easy way for us summer job seekers to help perpetuate the various unfair forms of discrimination upon which our society is built. See what a cynic first-year has made me?
The Homeless Doctor
We have more PhDs than we need. And that’s okay.
There seems to be a lot of anxiety these days about the state of PhD graduates, especially in the humanities. My energetic colleague Carson Jerema says plainly that there are too many PhDs in the humanities which is why we poor saps get paid less than our colleagues in business schools, and should be paid even less since there is a lineup down the street of docs just like us. Others suggest we must do more to train these poor, lost PhDs for careers outside the academy since they are not likely to find jobs in the big cruel world otherwise.
The first problem — that there is no point producing more PhDs than there are academic jobs to fill — is not a problem at all. We should produce more PhDs than jobs, because, pace Jerema, not every PhD is equal. It is easy to imagine that every person who has gone through the rigours of the doctoral process must emerge as a brilliant teacher and scholar, but it is not so. Many PhDs are merely competent scholars: smart people to be sure, but not luminous. A few are really quite average. How can this be? Well, for one thing, getting a PhD is more about commitment to one’s field than pure intelligence. For another, pure intelligence is not always easily applied or expressed. For still another, the PhD, at least in certain disciplines, is very specialized and so a detailed knowledge of a tiny corner of, say, organic chemistry, might be all you need to carry you through.
So the top ranks of the academy are a bit like the starting line-up of a major league baseball team. There are only a few spots and only the best — or those who fit best with a particular team — make it onto the lineup card. Meanwhile, there are more sitting on the bench, and then there are the thousands of minor league players competing for those spots. Most of them will never make it. Some will be good enough for back-up roles. Only a few will be everyday players and only a few of those will be stars.
My point, of course, is not that we should train thousands of PhDs for only dozens of jobs, but rather more generally, tenured professors should not just be barely qualified; they should be the very best. Of course, even now, this doesn’t always work out. Some very good scholars languish in part-time, sessional jobs, while others less brilliant get a lucky break. Such is the academy. Such is baseball. Such is life. But the larger point remains valid: a superabundance of talent overall allows for excellence at the very top. That’s also why tenured humanities professors deserve to be well paid. Not because they can’t be replaced, but because to replace them would be to replace them with somebody worse. Derek Jeter doesn’t command his millions because the Yankees can’t find someone else to play the infield. They could find a hundred decent players tomorrow. But they don’t want decent. They want the best, or as close as they can get. I’ve sat on plenty of academic hiring committees and when you look at all the applications, it’s clear that not everyone can hit the inside fastball.
Working in Canada for international students
You can hold a job while in school, just don’t expect much else in terms of support
We have an international readership here, and I received some mail the other day from a student hoping to study in Canada.
I am an international student considering education in a college in Toronto. I am also depending on part time jobs to take care of my living expenses. Now that the announcement has been made that recession is over in Canada, is the situation still the same or got better now and how do you expect it to be in the near future. Thanks in advance.
First, let’s talk about working on a student visa. It’s not nearly as difficult as it once was. The extended details can be found at this government website. The short version is that you can always work on campus with no restrictions. For off campus employment, you need to apply for an additional work permit that will allow you to work 20 hours per week during the school year and full-time during breaks and in the summer. I gather that’s a pretty straight-forward application and shouldn’t be a problem. Though as the site says, merely having the permit doesn’t guarantee anyone a job.
Now, I can’t swear that’s going to be enough to support your studies. In fact, once you combine living expenses and tuition the odds that you can earn enough to entirely cover your studies are probably quite slim. I’m not sure if that’s going to be a problem for the student who wrote me in this case, but it’s something that international students need to know. And it leads me around to an interesting point.
Quite a lot of international students are interested in studying here. I suppose that’s a good thing, and reflects well on Canada. But some of the questions they ask about funding, scholarships, and covering their costs suggests that not all international students understand how they are regarded by Canadian institutions and governments. Rightly or wrongly, no one really believes that Canada has an obligation to fund or support the studies of every student who wishes to come here. Those who can pay the full cost of their tuition (without the usual subsidies for domestic students) and also cover their living expenses are welcome to do so – but the idea that society owes people the chance to pursue post-secondary education just doesn’t apply to international students. The very few merit-based scholarships that are available are purely selfish in nature. The hope is that Canada will retain the best and the brightest.
Enrolment at Ontario colleges jumps seven per cent in 2009
Colleges CEO says about 90 per cent of grads find work within six months
For the third year in a row, enrolment at Ontario’s 24 community colleges has seen an increase in first-year full-time students.
Colleges Ontario says enrolment rose seven per cent this year, with more than 113,000 students in first-year full-time programs. This increase follows growth of 5.6 per cent last year and a six per cent increase in 2007.
The province’s 24 colleges have a combined enrolment of more than 200,000 full-time and 350,000 part-time students.
Colleges Ontario CEO Linda Franklin says about 90 per cent of college grads find work within six months and 93 per cent of employers are satisfied or very satisfied with the ones they hire.
She says there is also a growing demand for college grads despite the economic downturn and predicts the demand will intensify in the years ahead.
- The Canadian Press
Summer job market just the last straw
Students have plenty of reasons to be angry and frustrated
The Toronto Sun ran an article yesterday on the really bad summer employment situation for students. Of course I touched on this topic here already, but the Toronto Sun does add a new note of hysteria to the situation. It presents students as very angry and frustrated. And it connects the problem with the cost of education.
First, an observation. I don’t consider the Toronto Sun to be trend-setting media by any stretch but their politics are well established. When the Sun starts reporting on high tuition and debt burden among students as problems then it’s time to pay attention. These are not their usual political sympathies.
The situation with the summer job market for students, however, is a slender hook for this story. It’s well understood that this summer was a very bad time for a variety of reasons and this sort of perfect storm won’t soon be repeated. So the real story isn’t that students are heading into the new academic year down however much money they might have saved over the summer. A few thousand dollars more or less, when compared with total educational debt, just isn’t a big deal anymore. The story is the situation in general.
Students are frustrated with the cost of education and their future job prospects because they’ve been fed a load of crap and they know it. Increases in the cost of education are continually justified with reference to future income potential but the job market for your typical bachelor degree simply is not what it once was. More than that, it’s flatly irrational to suggest that the competing trend – to send more and more people through post-secondary education – won’t have an effect on the marketability of the resulting credentials. Downward pressure on the job market is very well understood at this point. But you’d think educational institutions and their promoters have never heard of the concept.
Your average post-secondary student probably isn’t thinking about these things in quite the same terms. But students are aware of their personal situations. They were promised an awful lot when they signed up for university or for college. It was supposed to be the “right” thing to do. And now, partway through, they find they can’t even score summer jobs spinning cotton candy at the Exhibition. It rather does tend to bring all the other frustrations and doubts to the surface.
This is a big topic all around. It touches on a lot of what’s fundamentally wrong with how we market and present post-secondary education and with deeply held political illusions on the topic. The summer job market, this year, is just a lightning rod for the frustrations that students feel. Unemployment is scary and frustrating. And for some, unavoidably, it’s just a dress rehearsal for the real scare they’ll face upon graduation.
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Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. Even the ones I don’t post will still receive answers, and where I do use them here I’ll remove identifying information.
After summer job slump, students seek financial help
At Dal, number of students applying for need-based awards increased by 62 per cent
With summer jobs in short supply, many university and college students now face the prospect of trying to get through the school year on less money or looking for other sources of cash.
So it may not be surprising that along with the spike in the jobless rate, there’s been a corresponding rise in traffic to websites offering information on scholarships and bursaries.
At Studentawards.com, a free scholarship search service, the cumulative increase in registration was 15 per cent in July compared to last year, said Suzanne Tyson, president of Studentawards Inc., the company behind the website.
Parents’ RRSPs and the education savings plans they set up for their children have probably taken a hit amid the economic turmoil of the last year, she noted.
“(Parents) may be losing their jobs and their children aren’t finding jobs, it is leading us to believe that this fall will be difficult financially for a number of students,” she said.
The student unemployment rate was 20.9 per cent in July, according to Statistics Canada.
Matt Scriven is one of the lucky ones.
The 19-year-old was able to find work this summer, but says one of his friends in Vancouver handed out between 30 and 40 resumes and received one or two calls – and didn’t get a job. Another friend in Ottawa handed out 20 or 30 resumes, and got a job that gave him five to 10 hours a week – not really enough to help with his expenses in the coming school year, he said.
Scriven found his own eventual job as web designer for the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association through a listing at Studentopolis.ca – the student jobs website he founded.
The Carleton University student started developing his website after speaking with a friend who said he wasn’t able to find an easy source to access student job listings online.
“A lot of adult workers were laid off their other jobs and now people will do pretty much any job to try and supplement their income because they’ve got families and such, so a lot of students are displaced from positions that they would otherwise have,” Scriven said from Ottawa.
Unemployed? You aren’t alone
Student unemployment is at a record high
Anecdotally I knew this already and I think a lot of us did, but if there was any remaining doubt, the statistics are in: Unemployment among students is at an all-time high. The Toronto Star reported on the story just today:
If you were in the market for a summer job I think you’re well within your rights to give up at this stage. If you were waiting for permission from someone to do that you can cite mine. Your parents and family may have trouble understanding the situation but at least now you can refer them to some hard data that reflects the true nature of things out there. It’s bad.
Of course it’s all about the downward pressure. As more qualified people lose their jobs or can’t find stable employment they compete for lower level positions. I have friends with one and two degrees who are unemployed and I know people in law school who had a lot of trouble finding summer employment. With those people still on the market it can’t be easy for university and college students to pick up much of anything. And I don’t even want to think about high school students. The way things are out there you might as well set up a lemonade stand.
Now I really hate to start any sentence with “when I was a kid” but here goes. When I was a kid I had my first real job at 14 years old. I worked at a Harvey’s. In hindsight I’m sure I was a really bad employee but hopefully I was at least worth the minimum wage they were paying me. That used to be the economic strategy around teenage workers as I recall it. You pay them crap and accept that they’ll screw around at least some of the time and a fair percentage won’t work out at all. But provided you’ve got the kids doing lower-level jobs it works out in the long run.
These days those jobs are going more and more to adults who are simply on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. Of course that’s bad for students who are looking for a chance to earn some money (as The Star’s article indicates) but it’s also a bad sign for the workforce generally. Instead of short-term jobs for people who presumably move onto other things, these low-level service jobs are becoming a permanent economic ghetto for immigrants and those with few credentials or other skills. And that’s a bloody shame. Though I guess that’s another topic.
For those who are in school and frustrated with unemployment I’ve got a bit of advice. First, don’t sweat it. It isn’t just you and it’s not your fault. You may want to engage in a little self-reflection and see if there’s anything you could be doing differently but if you’re satisfied with the way you present yourself and go about your job hunt there’s no need to worry this will be a long-term problem. Second, with only a month or so to go before school resumes, try to develop some positive routines a little in advance if you can. Because let’s face it, you tend to fall into some bad habits when you’re not working or in school.
If you’ve got a little too used to staying out all night and sleeping until noon you might want to snap that streak before the first week of classes. Get up at reasonable time in the morning – even if it’s only to watch cartoon for a bit. Read a few good books simply for pleasure. Try reading the paper every day. Establish a decent exercise schedule if you don’t have one already or make some changes to your diet if some are overdue. Do something you’ve been meaning to do that is definitely in your power – unlike finding a job which is out of your hands in many ways. Don’t set absolute or difficult goals for yourself such as losing X number of pounds. Just do something concrete and manageable. You want to head back to school in September on a high note, not all dejected from four months of fruitless job searching.
And yeah, don’t take it personally. It’s tough all around out there.
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Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. Even the ones I don’t post will still receive answers, and where I do use them here I’ll remove identifying information.
Recession helps wine school lure aspiring vintners
It’s not all romance: wine producers must master chemistry and agriculture
Soured on the real estate market, Columbia broker Bob Walters has found what he hopes is a more fruitful pursuit: growing grapes for wine. Downsized banker Mary Becker also is dabbling in the business, planting vines on the 120 acres south of Kansas City.
The aspiring vintners recently joined more than 60 others from eight states at the University of Missouri’s first Wine School, which teaches the tools of a trade that has been growing exponentially. The federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau reports a 50 per cent increase in the number of U.S. wine producers from about 3,900 in 2004 to about 5,800 in 2008.
Missouri, one of the nation’s leading wine producers before Prohibition, has seen similar growth, and instructors at the University of Missouri say rising unemployment could encourage even more oenophiles to try to turn their hobby into a new career.
“I was quite blown away by how everyone around here was a backyard winemaker,” said Rebecca Ford Kapoor, a New Zealand wine maker who two years ago joined the university’s Institute for Continental Climate Viticulture & Enology.
The school, which focuses on grape growing and winemaking in the Midwest, offers a one-day introductory class and an advanced, three-day course. The one-day session includes an obligatory winery visit (Les Bourgeois in Rocheport) and wine tasting. But most of the time is devoted to laboratory sessions involving beakers and flasks, tips on cellar operations and sanitation and tutorials on identifying and preventing flaws in the winemaking process.
Becker said she and her husband went into winemaking inspired but without technical acumen.
“We had no idea what we were doing,” the Holden resident said. “It’s been a real trial and error.”
Others enrolled in Kapoor’s course quickly realized the business involved more than careering through Napa Valley in a convertible or comparing vintages in a friend’s basement cellar. Successful wine producers must master chemistry and agriculture, she said.
“People think it’s all going to be romantic,” Kapoor said. “It’s actually really hard, dirty, exhausting work.”
