What with all the excitement over back-to-school and the federal election, I have been a bit remiss in keeping up with news from Statistics Canada.  Which is unfortunate, because One Thought’s favourite Stastcan analyst, Marc Frenette, had two papers out in September. They are well worth a quick look.

The first paper, Obtaining a Bachelor’s Degree from a Community College: Earnings Outlook and Prospects for Graduates, was released on September 9^th.  In the five provinces west of Quebec, it has been the case for some time that community colleges are able to issue degrees for some programs, though the practice is most common in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario.  This point of this paper is to compare the outcomes of theses college-based degrees (CBDs) versus those of more traditional university-based degrees (UBDs) in those three provinces by tracking graduates’ income using the linked Postsecondary Student Information System – T1 Family File (i.e. tax data).   

If you were only looking at this paper quickly (or skimming the Inside Higher Ed story about it), you might have stopped at the statement that “CBD holders earn about 12% more per year, on average, than UBD holders” two years after graduation.  On the face of it, that’s a pretty hefty advantage–one colleges should be crowing about and governments should be examining with great interest.  But it turns out it’s not quite that simple. 

College degrees are in much narrower fields of study than university degrees.  That’s a feature, not a bug: by and large, when governments green-lit the idea of college degrees, it was not so that colleges could replicate the entire suite of university degrees.  Rather, the idea was to allow colleges to offer degrees in niche areas, mainly related to business and technology.  And if you recall this blog’s annual look at graduate salaries, you’d know that business and engineering graduates tend to have higher-than-average incomes.  And as it turns, out, it’s the specific field of study which seems to be doing the work here: controlling for broad field of study, there is almost no financial advantage to a college degree.  Controlling also for age (college degree grads tend to be slightly older), there is no advantage: a UBD holder actually earns just slightly more.  Moreover, UBD holders tend to see their incomes rise more quickly in subsequent years.

My interpretation here is that this is still a pretty big “endorsement” for the idea of colleges granting degrees.  With proper quality oversight, these degrees can have results that look a lot like those of university degrees: what matters is the content, curriculum (and delivery thereof); the fact that the degree is not delivered in a university base doesn’t seem to matter that much.  That said, as the authors note, it’s not clear that this success would be replicated in other fields of study.  Although, let’s face it, this study is a pretty big invitation to start experimenting to see if the finding holds.  In Ontario, they should start experimenting, starting with Nursing.

The other new paper from Frenette (this time with co-authors Yuqian Lu and Winnie Chan) is entitled The Postsecondary Experience and Early Labour Market Outcomes of International Study Permit Holders.  The first half of the paper finds that over the period 2010-2015, both study visa awards and the percentage of students with study visas who actually showed up to enrol rose.  International students are still most likely to be university undergraduates, but college student numbers rose the fastest.  And approximately one-third of international students stay in Canada for five years after graduation. None of this is a particular surprise, though in the case of the students staying on after graduation, it’s nice to see the exact percentage confirmed.

The interesting stuff is in the second half: using methods similar to the ones used in the first paper, Frenette, Lu, and Chan followed a cohort of 2010 graduates who stayed in Canada through to 2015 and examined their labour market outcomes.  And as with the first paper, there was a similar kind of story.   If you just look at the headline numbers – who earns more five years after graduation – international students come out on top.  But if you control for level of education (international students are more likely to have advanced degrees), field of study (more likely in engineering and business) and age, the effect not only disappears, but in fact, international students are earning considerably less than native-born students – nearly $6,000 per year less.  This could be the result of weaker English/French language skills, smaller social networks (Canadians fill a really high percentage of jobs through non-public searches, which privileges those with better social networks), discrimination, or the bone-headed “Canadian experience” requirement, in which employers are somehow convinced that no amount of job experience abroad can possibly mean anything unless you have experience in the Canadian labour market.  As a country, we should be doing better than this, particularly if we are heading to record low levels of unemployment.

In short: two good surveys that leave us a little wiser about student outcomes, and which remind us to always look behind the headline data.