All Posts Tagged With: "recession"

Here are some job statistics you’ll want to consider

King Henry VIII from Wikimedia Commons

After a steep recession-era decline in hiring of academics in the arts and social sciences, potential PhDs have reasons for optimism—or despair—depending on how you look at it.

The good news is that job listings on the American Historical Association’s website, considered a market barometer for North America, increased from 569 in the 2009-10 academic year to 627 in 2010-11. That’s up 10.2 per cent year-on-year.

The bad news? That figure is still 40 per cent lower than the 1,064 jobs posted in 2007-08, before the recession led to budgetary restraint.

The modest rebound is a common theme across the arts and social sciences.

Continue reading Considering graduate school in the arts or social sciences?

Fewer students will leave universities short of funds to maintain their infrastructure, teaching staff and pay off their debts

For many Canadian universities increasing enrolment has been a point of pride but David Foot, author of Boom, Bust and Echo, recently told the Ryerson Eyeopener that due to Canada’s changing demographics “over the next two, three, four years the number of enrollments will start to decline.”

We’re already seeing this to a certain extent here in Quebec. English universities are increasingly attempting to attract Francophones because there is little room for growth in the Anglophone community. As well many Canadian universities are recruiting more and more international students to keep growth rates high. While the recent economic slowdown has pushed enrolment rates up, as the economy slowly recovers, and as those returning to school graduate, this factor will diminish.

Canadian universities are already becoming highly competitive when it comes to recruiting students from other parts of the country, open any student newspaper and you’ll see ads from other universities. Concordia ads have been spotted in Truro N.S. and while I was editor-in-chief of the Concordian student newspaper last year I received several emails from various universities encouraging me to apply for their journalism programs. This competition will only increase if enrolment drops and advertising and recruitment costs money that could be used for education.

Many, if not most, Canadian universities are carrying long-term debt in the millions of dollars and are counting on increasing enrolment to help pay off these debts. Lower enrolment will leave universities short of funds to maintain their infrastructure, teaching staff and pay off their debts.

Also, we’re currently in a period where universities are carrying out major construction projects. As part of the economic stimulus program the federal government is in the process of pumping $2 billion into university infrastructure and provinces are doing the same. Quebec alone is putting in more than $600 million. Now, not all of this money is going towards new buildings but a lot of it is. If enrolment drops will our expanded universities start to look like ghost towns?

Despite not having brand-name cachet, Canadian business schools excel in attractive areas

Many of Sarah Kaplan’s former students at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School asked her the same question when they found out she took a job at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management last year: “Why Canada?”

It’s an understandable question. Wharton, after all, is one of the top business schools in the United States, if not the world. And while Rotman has made significant strides in climbing up the global rankings over the past decade, it is still a long way from being considered in the same breath as Wharton, Harvard and Stanford—the sorts of places where a mere mention of the institution’s name will instantly open doors.

In fact, only two Canadian M.B.A. programs made it into the top 50 on the respected Financial Times list for this year. They are Rotman (45) and the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business (49). York University’s Schulich School of Business’s M.B.A. program was ranked 54th.

But rankings don’t paint a complete picture “Rotman has one of the top strategy departments,” Kaplan says. “If I look at the quality of research and quality of faculty, I’ve joined one of the top schools in North America.” For students, though, a lack of name recognition at Canadian schools presents a conundrum. While the education may be of high quality and more affordable than in the U.S., it can be more difficult to get on the radar of big U.S. companies and the recruiters that scour the globe for top talent.

The good news is that things are beginning to change. The meltdown that started on Wall Street and reverberated around the globe in a flurry of bank failures and government bailouts largely skipped over Canada, where a more conservative approach was credited for keeping the banking sector out of trouble. Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has since suggested that Canada be used as a model for other countries, an argument bolstered by global surveys and even U.S. President Barack Obama, who said, “Canada has shown itself to be a pretty good manager of the financial system and economy in ways that we haven’t always been.” And there’s reason to believe Canadian business schools are poised to benefit by association. “The fact that the Canadian economy gets a lot of attention can only be good for Canadian business schools,” Kaplan says.

The challenge will be successfully capitalizing on the spotlight to show the world that there’s more to the Canadian approach than being conservative about money—a trait that appeared admirable during a once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis, but may also be holding back the country when it comes to producing global champions.

The financial crisis, spawned by the risky mortgage-backed securities created by Wall Street, inevitably resulted in soul-searching about the roles of business schools in promoting a profit-at-all-costs breed of capitalism. By contrast, many Canadian schools emerged from the recession with comparatively little baggage, and even enjoyed a perception of being part of the solution.

It added up to a unique opportunity for those charged with attracting top talent north of the border. “When the American schools scaled back on their hiring, many of the Canadian schools took advantage of it,” says Rick Powers, Rotman’s associate dean, noting that Rotman has made several key hires as part of a drive that will see faculty grow from 115 to 150 over the next four years. In addition to Kaplan, new faculty includes: Kent Womack, a visiting professor of finance who has taught M.B.A. and executive programs at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College for over 10 years, and Partha Mohanram, an associate professor of accounting who came from Columbia University. Powers says, “Now Canada has become a very viable destination, not only for students, but faculty.”

Labour Force Survey shows improved unemployment rate for students

Students are finding summer employment more readily this year, compared to last, according to numbers released Friday by Statistics Canada.  The Overall unemployment rate, at 7.9 per cent, is at its lowest level since January 2009. While  the May and June job numbers improved for most demographics, they are particularly encouraging for the summer student job market.

The unemployment rate for youths aged 15-24 dropped 0.5 per cent between May and June, and about one per cent over June 2009, bringing it to 14.6 per cent. When isolating students, those who were full time in March and who are planning to return to school in the fall, the unemployment rate has improved faster. For students aged 20-24, the June  unemployment rate dropped 3.7 percentage points to 10.7, over June 2009. Last year unemployment for the same group increased by 4.8 per cent over 2008, the worst since 1997. For students aged 17-19, the June 2010 unemployment rate dropped 2.1 percentage points over June 2009 to 16 per cent.

Related: Students fight for summer jobs

With stiff competition for school related work, many students are forced to look elsewhere to pay the bills

At the start of her summer, Rebecca Eves packed up her white pickup truck with all her belongings and drove west from Ottawa, where she’s studying restaurant and hotel management at Algonquin College, to Red Lake, Ontario. Every student is looking for the perfect summer job, and for Eves, it means living in a bunkhouse, eating out of a pack and fighting forest fires.

While experts predict the recession is turning around, students continue to think outside the box on how to land their idea of the perfect summer job. Despite the appeal of desk chairs and business suits, some students are donning overalls and aprons and getting their hands dirty, literally.

Eves said she chose to fight fires with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources for the unique experience, even though it has nothing to do with her field of study. “I thrive off that feeling of satisfaction from being sore and dirty from working hard outside all day,” she said via text message from her remote base in Red Lake.

With the labour market lacking entry-level summer positions, many students are scrambling to find summer jobs related to their field of study.

Matt Wood, the executive director for the Ontario Association of Youth Employment Centres said the reality is students are searching longer and harder for career-related work. “I think with the recession in particular, but as is always the case, students are realizing that the labour market is more competitive and that they have to put some notches in their belt in career related jobs if they’re going to pursue their own vision for what their career is,” Wood said.

Wood said the transition between students graduating and landing a full-time job in their field is getting longer. While it doesn’t mean some students aren’t able to jump into their careers shortly after graduation, in the post-recession world Wood estimates for that making the leap into the career students have been preparing could be as long as 10 years. And, he said, post-recession, once coveted internships are increasingly lower paid or unpaid.

According to Statistics Canada, the unemployment rate of full-time Canadian students between the ages of 15 and 24-years-old ranged from 16.4 per cent in August 2009 to 21.1 per cent in May 2009. That rate increased significantly from the pre-recession data from 2008, which ranged from 11.4 per cent to 17.1 per cent.

With that in mind, Wood said students should expect, not only during the transition, but also during the summers ahead to explore all kinds of job options. “Everyone’s trying to get by until everything clicks,” he said. “They have to see that 10 year transition as an adventure.” For some students, summer means just that — a chance to pack away the pens and notebooks and look for a change of scenery. While many student jobs may not be career-advancing, Wood said these “McJobs” still pay the bills.

The Manitoba Conservation Fire Program also hires seasonal employees to man four to five member attack crews, similar to how Eves will spend her summer. Crews are dropped off by helicopter in a remote region suffering from wild or human-caused fires.

Fire Control Officer Jim Martinuk said students who fight with their crews find the job both “arduous” and “challenging.” Crews can expect to be on location for at least three days, he said. But in some cases the job can exceed two weeks. First-time students are provided with extensive fire and safety training before being sent to their first fire, and are required to pass a fitness test and have their First Aid and CPR certification.

Students are perfect candidates for fighting fires because they spend the school year retaining lots of important information in a short period of time. “Usually university students are more apt to pick up on the training, because they’re in that environment of learning. They adapt very well to picking up new skills.”

Students can also expect to make a decent chunk of cash. The program pays just over $16 per hour, plus several benefits such as weekend premiums, overtime pay and an allowance while on remote location.

Fighting fires isn’t the only forest-related work that tends to draw in students every summer. Tree planting across the country has been a popular student option for years. Those looking to get a tan, but avoid the beach, will find outdoor work and a decent income working for established companies such as Brinkman & Associates Reforestation Ltd. “We’re actually turning a lot of people away right now,” operations manager and coast coordinator Timo Scheiber said. The biggest draw he said simply is: “It’s fun.”

Scheiber said students can expect to make an average of $150 per day their first summer, at five cents to just over twenty cents per tree planted depending on the area. Staying in a remote location where financial pressures like rent, food and entertainment are non-existent, students can put their money in the bank for upcoming school year.

But beyond financial concerns, Scheiber said students learn valuable life skills on the job that are sure to impress future employers. “From a company perspective, when you’re hiring people to work in your organization, what you can’t quantify is their character. It’s the extras that make the difference,” he said

Moving across the country to work in the bush is not the only option for skill-building summer jobs. Often students choose to stay closer to home and work as summer camp counsellors, lifeguards, tutors, landscapers and a whole host of other positions.

OAYEC’s Wood said there are also opportunities for students to learn entrepreneurial skills in the summer by running their own businesses. Student Works, which operates in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes, has students form crews of painters, including a student crew chief, who contract and complete their own jobs under the banner of the trusted company name.

These types of jobs force students to develop problem-solving skills and marketing knowledge in a real work environment, while making some money.

Last summer, Matt Scriven, a 19-year-old Carleton University student, created job search site Studentopolis.ca to help students find work. The site currently hosts nearly 70,000 listings. He said while some students are focused on finding a career job, some students are less concerned with finding a job in their field. “I think the main thing for students is to find something fun and interesting, but also to make some money,” Scriven said.

Scriven said his site has lots of postings for typical students job opportunities like cooking, and labourer positions.

Students, he said, are often looking for work close to where they’ll be staying for the summer, which is why his site features an embedded Google Map for students to find jobs in their area. “Everyone’s strategy is a little different,” he said. While some aspire to their career dream jobs, some just look to get by for the summer, he said. “There are lots of jobs out there. It’s just a matter of what they want.”

As mature students flood unis, schools say they will not give priority to Grade 12 applicants

Ontario’s graduating high school students are facing stiffer competition for high-demand, high-employment college and university programs as workers who lost their jobs in the recession head back to school and claim the country’s coveted post-secondary education spots.

Colleges and universities will not give special priority to the Grade 12 candidates, administrators say, despite the fact they could be thrown out into a tough, recessionary job market with little or no work experience, and only a high school education if they’re not accepted. The deadline for Grade 12 students to apply to Ontario’s universities for next September is Wednesday; for colleges it is Feb. 1.

College applications overall were up by 10 per cent over the last several years, with those in areas with a high jobless rate experiencing increases of up to 50 per cent. The recession’s ravaging of the job market is pushing laid-off workers back to school and a wildly popular Ontario government program has provided many unemployed mature students with the financial means to do so.

In northern Ontario, for example, where the forestry industry’s collapse was followed by one in mining, Northern College saw applications for its four campuses jump 47 per cent last year. And that’s even before Extrada’s planned layoff of 700 people this May. In Windsor, where auto sector layoffs have battered the city, applications to St. Clair College were up by 20 per cent in 2009.

“When the economy is strong, students tend to put off going to school, going to college particularly, in favour of entering the workforce and earning some money,” said Northern College president Fred Gibbons. “When the economy turns soft as it has in 2009, students will then return to school or elect to leave high school and enter college . . . College enrolment tends to vary inversely with jobs in the economy.”

The Ontario government’s Second Career program, which provides laid off workers with up to $28,000 a year to go back to school to train for high-demand jobs, has been a huge incentive for mature students. Second Career was announced in 2008 as a $355-million, three-year program. However, it was so popular that the money was scooped up in 18 months as laid off workers headed back to school and the province pumped another $78 million into the program last October.

Tough times don’t have to mean tough luck for M.B.A. grads, especially in Canada

A funny thing happened to Jordan Sugar this spring, as he prepared to finish his M.B.A. degree at York University’s Schulich School of Business: he got a job. And not just any job—he got one in banking.

For Sugar, who was hired by BMO to work on its trading desk, that was something of a surprise. After all, classroom chatter around Schulich about job prospects had been every bit as depressing as the economic tragedy playing out on the front pages of newspapers. “Some graduates from 1999, 2000, 2001 came in to talk to my class about graduating amid the dot-com burst and I thought, ‘My God, I couldn’t imagine finding a job in that climate,’ ” recalls Sugar. “Then I saw Lehman Bros. go under and I thought, ‘Uh-oh.’ ”

If last year’s fall of global financial titans—traditional destinations for a big chunk of graduates—seemed to make M.B.A. job prospects disappear overnight, the ensuing global recession made the outlook even more grim. At least outside of Canada. Here, the picture has turned out to be far different. The country’s banking system has held up well, avoiding the need for the large-scale bailouts seen elsewhere. That strength has translated into a sustained job market for M.B.A.s: while American business schools report a drop of as much as 50 per cent in financial sector hiring, Canadian business schools say hiring levels remain strong, though down slightly from last year’s above-normal figures.

That means recent graduates like Sugar, who thought the dream of a banking job sank along with Bear Stearns, are finding that opportunities remain, especially for the most aggressive and talented graduates. “In all the doom and gloom, you want to hear some counter-stories out there, and Canada may be one of them,” says Joseph Palumbo, executive director of the Career Development Centre at York’s Schulich School of Business in Toronto.

It’s not all sunny, of course. Hiring by consultancies such as McKinsey, Deloitte & Touche and Boston Consulting Group has either dropped or remained flat—their clients tightened consulting budgets as the economy faltered. All in all, Canadian business schools report that hiring numbers so far have fallen between two and 15 per cent this year compared with 2008, when hiring was up about 10 per cent over 2007. Though firm stats will emerge this fall, schools say current hiring levels appear to be on par with those seen in 2005.

And while on the whole their performance so far in finding jobs for grads has Canadian business schools cheering, concern remains that the fretting by business schools south of the border might head their way. “The real losses in the financial sector, in New York and in London and throughout the rest of the world, have created a climate of fear that we’re acutely aware of here, even though the data in Canada does not indicate a downturn on any significant scale,” says Jeff Muzzerall, director of the Corporate Connections Centre at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

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.

Most lost jobs expected to be in operations, trades, advisory and technical positions

The greatest job losses are expected to effect the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, which represents some 4,265 university staff in operations, trades, advisory and technical positions. “Of course, we don’t like it,” says AUPE president Doug Knight.

“The university has put a lot of their shortfalls on last year’s budget. A lot of the money lost is from the worldwide financial crisis, where it was inevitable something was gonna break. Their funding shortfall is because of endowments and they really shouldn’t be relying on endowment funding.”

For more on this story, click here.

For students 20 to 24, unemployment hits 14 per cent, the highest rate since 1997

In this story, published today, The Globe and Mail’s Elizabeth Church has some great anecdotes about students who are struggling in summer 2009′s tough job market.

Her article is timely, considering two studies that were recently released.

In Statistics Canada’s latest labour force survey, the agency found that compared with June 2008, employment was down 43,000 for students aged 20 to 24 in June 2009. That means their unemployment jumped 4.8 percentage points to 14 per cent, which is the highest June unemployment rate for these students since 1997.

StatsCan also found that the labour market for 17 to 19-year-old students is slumping. Employment for this age group was down 50,000 between June of 2008 and 2009. That brings their unemployment rate to 18.1 per cent, the highest since June 1998.

In another report released last February, the Educational Policy Institute predicted rising youth unemployment will add more than 105,000 new borrowers to the Canada Student Loan Program in the next three years. The study found that a one per cent rise in youth unemployment increases the demand for student loans by about six per cent.

For more from this story, click here. For Jobless? No, I’m funemployed click here.