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Category: Apprenticeships, Skills & Trades

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

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
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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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