Tag: Employment

Those “Lost Generation” Stories

I see Maclean’s is cashing in on the zeitgeist with yet another story about a “lost generation“.  These stories always cover the same arc: Find a young, bright, hardworking, recent graduate whose career, for one reason or another, hasn’t hit lift off; blame this situation on the recession, even though that link can’t really be proven; provide some cod-economic arguments as to why this state of affairs is permanent; repeat. But we should know it’s not true, because we’ve seen

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Core Curricula, Better Outcomes

The core problem of ensuring that university students get the general employability skills they want and need to succeed in the labour market isn’t that universities think it’s the wrong thing to do. Rather, the problem is that they think it’s flat-out impossible. To be clear, this isn’t because they think that competencies acquired in general arts and sciences are antithetical to those in demand in the labour market (in fact they seem to believe the opposite). Rather it is

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Universities and Employment: Whose Job is it, Anyway?

Not surprisingly, a few of our readers have been pushing back on the series this week. Mainly, they’re skeptical that universities, in fact, have any responsibility where is employment is concerned. One line of argument is that students, themselves, are not in fact that concerned with employment. Exhibit #1 for this view is usually the well-known factoid that although 80% of students say they are at university to improve their employment prospects, a similar percentage say they are there because

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What Students Think They Lack

A treat today! More data from our CanEd Student Research Panel on employment. You know the drill: 1280 students from our regular monthly panel. We asked these students what skills or attributes they thought they “lacked but most wished they had” in terms of landing a job after graduation. Here’s the interesting thing: very few students thought they were deficient in any technical skills. For the most part, it’s the soft skills students thought they lacked. Among the most common

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What Students Want to Be

…when they grow up, that is. It’s a question we don’t ask that often. Yet since one of higher education’s supposed purposes is to give students a leg up in the search for work, it’s the kind of thing you’d think we’d want to know. So, anyways, using our CanEd Student Research Panel, we asked 1280 students across the country about their employment futures. For starters, we asked them what sector they saw themselves as destined for. Expected Employment by

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