All Posts Tagged With: "labour market"
Relax, the liberal arts are not going anywhere
Students are still flocking to study the soft sciences
Everywhere you look, someone is arguing that the government doesn’t pay sufficient attention to the liberal arts. All 19 Canadian Excellence Research Chairs (CERC), announced last month, came from technical fields, prompting sharp rebuke from the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences. More recently, on Saturday, the Globe and Mail ran an interview with University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum to discuss her new book Not for profit: Why Democracy needs the Humanities.
I have not yet had the opportunity to read Nussbaum’s book, so I will reserve comment on it. But, the interviewer prefaces the conversation with what seems to be a widely held belief: “As the critical thinking taught by the humanities is replaced by the unexamined life of the job-seekers, our ability to argue rights and wrongs is silenced.” There are a number of assumptions loaded into this statement. Presumably, the humanities, once dominant in university, have been “replaced” by more utilitarian fields. And, presumably, study of the humanities is required to “argue rights and wrongs.” On the latter point, I will defer to Andrew Potter who takes on the “Education for Freedom” argument.
The notion that the liberal arts have been “replaced” is somewhat misleading. If we are talking about the government’s obsession with attempting to substitute private innovation with publicly funded innovation in the Ivory Tower, then, fine, the liberal arts may be under appreciated. Of course, there is little new in the Conservative government’s strategy towards universities. The debate surrounding the excellence chairs is essentially a reheating of the debate that Jean Chretien’s government sparked when it created the Canada Research Chairs program, and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation.
Whatever might be the correct level of public funding for the liberal arts, be it for teaching or research, when we consider what students are actually studying there is little to suggest that the liberal arts are on their way out.
A Statistics Canada report, released in December, that surveyed university graduates between 1992 and 2007 confirms that the social sciences remains ever dominant, and that the proportion of students graduating from the humanities has remained steady. At 22 per cent, in 1992 the social and behavioural sciences and law graduated more students than any other category of university subjects. That number declined only slightly to 20 per cent by 2007, yet retained the number one position. As for the humanities, it retained its fourth place ranking with 11.3 per cent of all university graduates, also declining only slightly from 12.8 per cent.
There were slight increases to the number of students graduating in the hard sciences and health-related fields, but the proportion of students graduating from any given field has barely budged. While Statscan reported other demographic changes, such as a widening of the gender gap, and a greater proportion of international students attending Canadian universities, “there has been relatively little change in the overall composition of graduates’ fields of study.”
Although the data Statscan has used is somewhat dated, the period being considered featured major shifts in Canadian higher education. Federal funding was gutted during the mid-nineties and when the money returned, it was increasingly focused on research that would presumably be useful for economic growth. Not to mention more emphasis being placed on marketable skills for students.
While replacement of the liberal arts may still be in the future, the fact that it hasn’t occurred already suggests that the liberal arts are more robust than the constant predictions of their imminent decline would have us believe. Despite what would seem like Ottawa’s and the province’s best efforts, students are attracted to the liberal arts as much as they ever were.
Such interest would appear to hold true in the face of declining rates of return for graduates of these fields. A paper published last June in Education Economics that analyzed National Graduate Survey dating back to the 1980s concluded that “substantial increases in lifetime earnings” would be needed “to draw students into fields of study they are not inclined to choose initially.” This implies that once students make up their minds to major in, say, English, it is not so easy to get them to switch to, say, engineering, simply by emphasizing the difference in economic returns.
So while governments may need convincing as to the value of the social sciences and the humanities, whatever that may be, students need no convincing. In short, the liberal arts are not going anywhere.
Grad school applications up
Slowing economy prompts more students to stay in school
MONTREAL — With entry-level job postings down as much as 25 per cent, Canadian graduate schools are bracing for an increase in applications for next year as students opt to stay in school longer rather than enter the workforce at a time of economic uncertainty.
The University of Toronto has already received 12,631 grad school applications, about nine per cent more than it had received at the same time last year, graduate studies dean Susan Pfeiffer said.
While applications are still pouring in, Queen’s University MBA director Scott Carson said the prestigious program has thus far received twice the number of applications it had at this time last year.
“In times of economic slowdown, yes, university participation rates tend to go up,” added Tom Buckley, registrar at the Saint John campus of the University of New Brunswick.
“At this point it’s a little too early to tell if we’re seeing an actual increase, but we would sort of be inclined to anticipate an increase. Students will take a look at graduate study and professional programs if the job market is soft in their area.”
Administrators expect competition for scarce entry level jobs will be fierce, but so too will competition for some graduate programs given the increase in applications.
Gregg Blachford, McGill University’s director of career planning services, admitted an influx in grad school applications is common in tough economic times, but he cautions students against staying in school for the wrong reasons.
“There are still jobs and…opportunities out there, especially for university graduates,” he said, adding students can’t just rely on postings but must also reach out to potential employers.
“We encourage students to continue to look for work in the same way, but they’ll probably have to work harder to get a position than previously.”
While his counterparts at the University of Calgary suggest job postings at the school have dipped as much as 25 per cent, Blachford said McGill has experienced just a 10 per cent decline thus far.
Despite a small drop in participants at their upcoming technology career fair, Blachford said employer participation in university job fairs remains strong for most industries.
University of Calgary career services director Voula Cocolakis said the annual career fair that takes place in February was totally sold out by this time last year and she’s optimistic it will sell out again.
Still, she said a few companies have pulled out while others have forsaken taking out ads or sponsorship opportunities related to the event in order to cut down on costs.
As for last year’s graduates, career experts say it doesn’t appear employers are, to any great degree, reneging on earlier offers of employment because of the economic situation.
“The last time that happened it was the 2001 bubble bust… That was the dot-com bust,” said Andre Gagnon, Concordia University’s career services co-ordinator.
“That was really heavy.”
Carson said the number of Queen’s MBA students who’ve already secured jobs is actually on par with last year and he’s heard of just one student who had a job offer delayed before it was ultimately rescinded due to the ailing economy.
According to Statistics Canada figures released last week, more than 34,000 jobs were lost across the country last month alone.
Still, despite the grim forecasts, university administrators and job experts suggest generation Y may well be in the best position to weather this economic storm.
Some suggest most are wrapped up in their studies and haven’t really given much thought to their job prospects just yet.
But while they may get off to a slow start – some might even have to move back in with mom and dad for a time – they will catch up quickly as they’re called upon to replace retiring baby boomers, said Adwoa Buahene, a workplace demographics expert and founder of n-gen People Performance Inc.
She said gen-Yers are also multi-skilled individuals who don’t see themselves staying at the same job or even in the same career for the rest of their lives, which makes them more “adaptable” to the current environment.
— The Canadian Press
Forget grad school!
Why the academic labour market may not be about to open up
For those taking the PhD plunge, the prospect of finding meaningful employment has always been a concern. Despite rosy predictions from the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC), the PhD job market may be heading into another tight period.
From the early 1990s to about 1998, the number of employed university professors (of all ranks) shrunk by 3,000, or close to 10 per cent. Many tenured positions were eliminated through retrenchment policies where universities calculated that paying out professors willing to retire early would lead to a more stable financial footing in the long run.Similar policies were implemented across the country and the average age of retirement for all Canadians dropped precipitously.
The trend eventually reversed, and between 1998 and 2006, about 22 per cent new faculty positions have been added, including a 37 per cent increase in tenured track appointments. The tight 1990s has, however, left the percentage of Canadian faculty aged 55 or older disproportionately higher than it otherwise would have been.
The AUCC assures us that at least 22,000 renewal faculty will be needed over the next 10 years. The lobby group is also certain that hordes of students supposedly entering university over the same period will further drive up the demand for university professors.Seems like a bright future for up and coming scholars everywhere, doesn’t it? I will set aside the claim that university enrolments will continue to increase, as Maclean’s has consistently challenged that assumption (see here and here).
The AUCC is working from the assumption that as the average retirement age normalizes, it will resettle to what it was before the 90s; that is, at 65. However, a number of trends suggest this might not be the case.For starters, mandatory retirement in the Ivory Tower is quickly becoming a thing of the past (see here, here and here).
What’s more, recent “corrections” in the market have threatened retirement savings and stock portfolios both in Canada and south of the border, further suggesting delayed retirement as faculty aim to recoup losses to ensure they will be as comfortable as they had planned.
As Brian Leiter, a University of Chicago philosophy professor, put it recently: “The catastrophic June in the stock markets means that a lot of faculty who might have been thinking about retirement in the coming year are going to postpone given the huge losses most will have suffered.”
Leiter estimates that demand for philosophy doctoral degree holders, the labour market is retracting to what it was about 15 years ago. In the early 1990s “there were 2.3 candidates per job,” and though that number slackened to 1.4 by the beginning of this decade, Leiter predicts that “we will be back at 2.3 before long, if we are not there already.”
While this is not necessarily representative of all disciplines, fields in the humanities such as philosophy are always hardest hit.It is true that even if the economy gets worse in the U.S., things could play out differently up here. However, Canadian and American PhDs compete in the same job market. If the academic labour market tightens in the U.S., that just means more American PhD holders competing for jobs up here.
Of course, none of this means that baby-boomer professors won’t have to be renewed. It simply means that the renewal will be rather flat, as opposed to the explosion the AUCC has apparently predicted. But as anyone scrounging around for a tenure-track position will tell you, there is a limited time frame after one first earns their PhD before their degree is considered “stale,” ultimately condemning them to a lifetime of hopping from one sessional appointment to another.
Add to this the fact that though a good deal of tenure-track positions have been added in recent years, many have been replaced permanently with sessional contract positions—as well as the reality that many who will retire in the coming years never earned tenure to begin with—and the rosiness of the academic labour market vanishes. Never mind if universities feel the need to re-implement retrenchment policies.
In fact, a slacker and easier academic labour market might have already come and gone. We just missed it.
