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Category: Apprenticeships, Skills & Trades

Bad Memory

Some really sobering stuff in a paper I just got from Statscan called, “Job Market Realities for Post-Secondary Graduates”.  Listen to this: “Graduates of a field with low unemployment and little underemployment were also likely to earn high salaries and be content with their jobs.  They were usually graduates of job-oriented fields such as engineering, teacher training, most health disciplines, business, computer science and some technologies.” “A more general education in subjects with little practical application often (leads) to a

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June 2, 2014 No Comments

Rewind on Those Foley/Green Numbers

So, you may remember that last week I published this neat little graph from the National Graduates Survey, showing university and graduate incomes across all ten provinces, three years after graduation.  Note that although the numbers vary by province, the university number is always higher than the college number. Median Earnings of College and Bachelor’s Graduates Three Years After Graduation, in 2013               The super-keen among you may also remember something I wrote three

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April 16, 2014 No Comments

Some Final Thoughts on German Apprenticeships

If you’ve been following our Minister of Employment and Social Development, Jason Kenney, lately, you’ll know that he’s taken a keen interest in German apprenticeships.  So much so that his office recently organized a study trip to Germany, to which various provincial education ministers and Ottawa association types were also invited. There are, basically, eight major differences between our system of apprenticeships and theirs. To wit: 1)      Our apprenticeship system is post-secondary, and caters to people in their 20s.  Theirs is

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March 26, 2014 1 Comment

Smarter Policy on Apprenticeships

I’m pretty sick of the discourse around apprenticeships in Canada.  But that doesn’t mean I’m against apprenticeships; quite the opposite, actually.  I’d just like policy formation on the subject to revolve around something more intelligent than MOREMOREMOREWENEEDMORE. Instead of focussing the discussion entirely around intake rates, we could be having much more productive discussions about any of the following: 1.        How do we increase completion rates? Contra most of the rhetoric you hear, Canada’s apprenticeship intake rates are pretty good – and in

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March 4, 2014 12 Comments

The Canada Apprentice Loan

One of the signature pieces in last week’s budget was the Canada Apprentice Loan (CAL).  Very few details were given out at the time (see p. 70 in the budget, here), but what details did emerge suggest two things to me: first, that the idea went into the budget less-than-fully-baked; and second, that it could turn out to be a fairly significant political mess. The proof of this being less-than-fully-baked is the lack of detail surrounding the idea.  While the

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February 18, 2014 9 Comments

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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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