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Category: Apprenticeships, Skills & Trades

Reminder: Hot Jobs and Hot Careers Never Last

There was an interesting piece in the National Post last week about unemployed professionals in the Alberta oil and gas industry.  In amidst the occasional whine about the oil industry being so unloved by the rest Canada, there is a serious article about what happens to people in specialized professions when the economic tide swings away from that profession.  Some quotes: Philip Mulder, spokesman for the Association of Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA), said its geoscientists are faring badly in

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September 1, 2016 6 Comments

What’s Going On With College Graduates in Ontario?

I see that Ken Coates and Bill Morrison have just written a new book  called Dream Factories: Why Universities Won’t Solve The Youth Jobs Crisis.  I haven’t read it yet, but judging by the title I’d assume that it makes pretty much the same argument Coates made back in this 2015 paper  for the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, which in effect was “fewer university students, more tradespeople!” (my critique of this paper is here) With the fall in commodity prices, it’s

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May 2, 2016 No Comments

Party Platform Analysis: The Conservatives

Back again for some more election platform analysis.  This week: the Conservatives.  But first, a caveat.  Part of the problem with trying to analyze party platforms in a 326-day election is that one’s rhythm gets all thrown off.  In a five-week campaign, all of the announceables are pretty much there in the first 21 days or so, so you more or less know when a party’s done announcing things.  In this election, we’re weeks into the campaign and we can’t

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September 18, 2015 1 Comment

The Minimum Wage Shtick

One little rhetorical trick you sometimes see anti-tuition types using is a comparison between tuition and minimum wage.  Last year for instance, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternative put out a piece saying that working at minimum wage (which is in fact relatively rare for students, who typically earn about 25% more than minimum wage), students today have to work more than twice as much as students thirty years ago in order to pay tuition.  What should we make of

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April 29, 2015 4 Comments

Apprenticeships and Commodity Prices

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the commodities “supercycle” coming to an end.  The most immediate evidence for this is what’s happening with the price of oil, which is falling rapidly (the spot price is down 27% in the last 4 months, but more importantly the 5-year futures price is down 24% ).   That’s both because of weaker global demand and because there’s a lot more oil out there than there used to be, thanks to (among other

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October 31, 2014 1 Comment

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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