Don’t Go to School?

I have one useless undergraduate degree. Useless but it was very expensive. When I finished school I realized I couldn’t afford to do my master’s and without it, my degree was worth little more than the paper (diploma) that announced it. Scholarships were not an option (long story) and another loan would probably have rendered me homeless. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t try to pursue that master’s degree — I know people who have done exactly that and never worked a day in their field because: no jobs.

As for me and my undergrad, I finished school and embarked on a desperate search for work that would demand a degree in psychology. The only thing I was able to find was a volunteer position at a distress centre — very rewarding, but it didn’t pay the bills. After a few months of struggling with awful part-time gigs, the bills for my student loans started showing up and it became apparent that going to school was the worst mistake I’d ever made. I know this is a strong statement, but 15 years later I still stand by it. I couldn’t pay my bills, I had creditors after me and I was unemployed — it was probably the worst time in my life. Eventually, I found something at a bank that, let me tell you, did not require a psychology degree (although I’m sure it helped a little when dealing with upset customers).

Are the graduates who are debt-free in a better position? I’m not sure. A close friend graduated with a fine arts master’s degree two years ago with zero debt thanks to scholarships and an RESP, and today, he’s still working retail, making just enough to pay his rent and groceries. He’s applied everywhere but the jobs in his field tend to have a slow turnaround and he’ll most likely have to move in order to find something that’s remotely related to what he’s been educated to do. Another friend, who graduated from teacher’s college last year, has been struggling to make ends meet, taking on tutoring gigs, and supplying her income by working in restaurants. In the yahoo article Universities to blame for glut of unemployed teachers, lawyers?, Andrew Langille, a labour lawyer and founder of Youthandwork.ca, says, “the current need [for teachers] is for no more than 5,000 new teachers a year, a number that isn’t anticipated to change for the next decade at least.” This is significant because “there are now 9,000 new teachers graduating each year in Ontario alone and another 3,000 arriving from the U.S. and abroad hoping to find work in the province.” Langille says: “There are enough unemployed teachers in Ontario that the province could not graduate another teacher in the next 10 years and still have enough.”

Furthermore, the University Degrees' Value Declining As Costs Remain High: CIBC Report article says, “Canada has the highest proportion of adults with post-secondary degrees among member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). But Canada's share of graduates who earn less than the national median income is the highest in the OECD, and the cost of a post-secondary education in Canada is almost double the OECD average.”

And, if you factor into this that nearly two million Canadians had student loans totalling $20-billion (2012), getting a post-secondary education is a really risky endeavour.

So what to do about this problem? The yahoo article says that “the solution to the skills gap is for students, the government and schools to all pay more attention to the realities of the labour market.”

I don’t know what that would look like in practice — would there be no more degrees offered for jobs that are impossible to find? Probably not. But maybe there is a way to educate students about such realities before we actually educate them. I don’t remember anyone (like the bank lending me money to pay tuition, hello!) letting me know that my degree was probably not going to lead to a job. I know, I know — I was a big enough girl to go to school but I was still very much a kid — idealistic and with zero foresight. 

As Mike Rowe once said, “We are lending money we don’t have to kids who can’t pay it back to train them for jobs that no longer exist.”

Article Written By: Jowita Bydlowska is a writer-editor for poss.ca. She has written for a number of national and international publications such as The Globe and Mail, Oxygen magazine, enRoute, Warsaw Insider and others. She volunteered as a counsellor at a distress centre for two years. Jowita writes for a living and for fun. Originally published on www.poss.ca