What to Consider If You're Considering University: New Rules for Education and Employment

Columbia

Introduction

So You’re Thinking of Going to University

STOP! Stop right now before reading any further. Ask yourself three crucial questions:

• Why?

• Why?

• Why?

If you are wondering why we ask this question three times, it’s because it is so vital for your future.

For those of you just finishing your secondary education, choosing your path after high school is one of the most important decisions you will ever make, perhaps the most important. It’s crazy to do it without giving it serious thought. It’s equally foolish to make it based solely on what other people want you to do, or think you should do. For better or worse, your decision will shape your future in dramatic ways. You need to think long and hard about it. That’s what we want to talk to you about.

Going to university can be a good choice. But it’s not a good choice for all high school graduates. For some, it can be disastrous — leading to debt, disillusionment, and failure. University is not the only good option open to you. Have you considered:

• Polytechnics?

• Community colleges?

• Starting a business?

• Working for a year or two?

• Travelling or volunteering?

• An apprenticeship?

If you’re listening to the general chatter — particularly from parents, guidance counsellors, and politicians — you may believe that university is your only option. It isn’t. For some of you, going to university will be a terrific choice that launches you on a path to happiness and prosperity. For others, it will be a totally wrong choice. Many students find out too late that they’ve made a bad decision, and end up back home by Christmas or the spring, poorer and sadder for the experience. Others will slog unhappily to the convocation finish line — only then to discover that they are ill prepared for the world of work.

Of course your parents are ambitious for you. They want you to get a job indoors in a comfy office. They don’t want you to end up working outside an office doing a job that involves physical labour — unless, of course, you are working on some environmental or similarly prestigious issue. And, let’s be honest, your parents also want you out of the house, preferably before you are thirty, with the money you need to launch into a good life.

For those of you who already have an undergraduate degree or who find yourselves feeling insecure about your current situation, you may be wondering what to do next. Perhaps the job you were dreaming of hasn’t materialized. You wanted to be a teacher, but there are so many unemployed teachers in their twenties that it’s impossible to find a teaching job. You are working in a Starbucks, not a high school. This wasn’t why you borrowed $30,000 and spent four to six years in university.

Should you return to university to get a different, or advanced, degree? Should you go to a polytechnic or a community college and qualify for working in a trade? Something must be done: you are on the good side of thirty (but not by much) and your parents are hinting that they’d like to downsize their house. The choices you made after high school have not worked out as you’d hoped. Obviously, you cannot un-make them, but you are young enough to make a new choice.

Regardless of how you came to be making this decision, now is the time to make smart, informed choices. This book will help you make the decision which best suits you; it also will help you prepare to meet the demands of today’s workforce.

An Uncertain Future

The future is as uncertain as it has been at any time in the last 150 years. People do not have a clue about what’s to come. Twenty years ago, the main things that now define your life — smartphones, Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, sexting, on-demand videos, iTunes, and illegal downloads — simply did not exist. Twenty years from now, who knows? Right now, China is on track to become the world’s largest economy. The United States is on shaky ground. India is on the rise — and the Philippines and Vietnam may not be far behind. Europe, once solid and reliable, is torn by financial crises and social tension. You should see how limited the job prospects are for young adults in Europe these days!

In this unstable environment, how do you prepare for a successful future? The knowledge economy? Those who talk about it don’t really know if a university degree will give you a good career. That huge demand for skilled trades in the western resource economy? Don’t count on it lasting forever. The coming flood of retirements that will create hundreds of openings for young people? Not with middle-class jobs disappearing so fast. At least, the experts say, the service economy will remain strong — but will it?

We live at a time of constant and dramatic change. No one really knows what lies ahead — not us, not your parents or teachers, not politicians or governments, and not the college and university recruiters. Indeed, the only piece of wisdom about which we have absolute confidence is this: no one knows how the next ten to forty years will unfold.

And yet, here you stand — ready to make the choices that will determine your future. Before you leap into it, you have some tough decisions to make. If you are about to graduate, you need to determine how you will make your way into the confusing, high-stakes world of life after high school. Your parents and guidance counsellors urge you to go to college or university. If you live out west, you might be tempted by a well-paid, low-skill job in the resource sector. You may be planning to leave home. (Be honest: Doesn’t everyone want to be fully independent from their parents?) If you want to go to university, which one do you pick? And if you’ve already gone to university, did you make the right choice? Which program? Why not college? Are the polytechnics really different? How about an apprenticeship program? Or a year of travel or international work, or even volunteering? So many options, so many expensive choices, and so little guidance.

Preparing Yourself: How We can Help

This is where we come in. We want to help you make a careful choice about your future. Whatever you choose to do will have upsides and downsides. It costs a small fortune to go to university — and the money is poorly spent if you drop out after a year (or sooner) or if you cannot find a decent job after graduation. We have watched too many students make too many bad choices over the years. We want to help you figure out what is best for you — for now and for the future. Time spent thinking and planning your future may well be the best investment you ever make.

As we proceed here, we will try to maintain an avuncular[1] tone — we’ll keep it friendly and informal. We like universities and we like students. We wish both of them well, though we recognize that both have their faults. We also are fond of colleges and really keen about polytechnics, and we like well-planned travel, work, or volunteering. We offer ourselves as guides — two veteran university teachers who have been working with young adults for, well, a very long time.

Preparing for life after high school and university is a difficult and confusing task, for parents as much for the young adults heading off to advanced education or the world of work. We want to help. We have seen thousands of new students make their nervous way onto campuses. We have welcomed them to their first class at university, and have sat with them and their parents when their university dreams exploded in a welter of failed examinations, skipped classes, and poor essays. As parents ourselves, we have watched our children work their way through their studies. We know that there is nothing easy about what lies ahead. We have seen many students fail at university — and then succeed in life. We have watched young adults make foolish decisions that hounded them all their lives. We have seen people under-estimate the value of a college diploma and misunderstand the importance of work. We think we have some wisdom to share.

We should, however, confess: we are both old. One of us is moderately old; the other is really old. One of us got his BA in 1978 and other in (shudder) 1963. So, why should you listen to a couple of seniors? Let us ask you this: Do you want advice from some newcomer who just got out of college the day before yesterday, the ink on the diploma still damp, some dude who hasn’t got over his last beer bust? Or, would you rather listen to two guys who’ve been in and around universities in Canada and all over the world (first as students, and then as teachers and administrators) for a total of nearly ninety years? There’s not much we haven’t seen and done at universities — and here we are giving you the benefit of all this hard-won experience. Go ahead: listen to this newbie next door, or to a couple of veterans. Your life, your choice.

We don’t presume to tell you what to do, since the life trajectory of each family and every student is different. If you do choose to go to university, we can offer insights into how they operate, what typically happens to families and students in their first year, and how to get the most from a university career. But if you decide — as many of you should — to choose one of the various non-university options available to you, we can help you to be clear about your rationale and your prospects. Even those of you have already completed a course of study can, we think, benefit from what we have to offer.

Let us make this crystal clear: we believe that, for the right student, with the right attitude, a university education is an unbeatable experience and a fully worthwhile investment. If you are that student, your university experience will help you to develop valuable skills, gain insights into the human condition and the natural world, make great friends and life-long contacts, and emerge at convocation as a profoundly changed person. However, we also know that colleges, polytechnics, and apprenticeships are brilliant options for just as many students — and that time spent travelling, working, or volunteering can equally set you up for a very successful life.

In the chapters that follow, we are going to encourage you to consider all options — university, apprenticeship programs, colleges, polytechnics, entrepreneurships, religious and military colleges, volunteering, travel, and work — before making a decision about what comes next. Whether you are a soon-to-be high school graduate who can draw upon your parents to support you in this process or a young adult who needs to make a change, we are going to help you to think long and hard about the match (or mismatch) between your skills and interests and the choices you are considering. We will ask you to look deep into yourselves to honestly identify your desires, abilities, and work ethic to succeed in the demanding and largely unsupervised world that you’re about to enter.

We have written this book to challenge you to look at the wide variety of options available to you — and not simply default to the one closest to home. For some of you, this process may affirm the choice that was already at the top of your list; for others, the outcome may be very different from what you expected. In either case, we’ll have done our job, you’ll have done your homework, and we believe that you’ll be better prepared for what lies ahead.

CHAPTER ONE

The CrossRoads:

Making Choices that Matter

Arriving at the Crossroads

So, you’re reading this book because you have reached a significant crossroads in your life. Now is the time for you to decide what you will do next — and the options are many. Chances are, as a Canadian youth or young adult, you’ve heard that attending university is the only responsible choice you can make. That message — which underlies our family, entertainment, business, industrial, and governmental interactions — may well have been accurate for your parents’ and grandparents’ generation, but things have changed. If you’re going to make the choice that is right for you, you need — first and foremost — to consider not only where we, as a society, are but also where we are going. In this chapter, we’ll do our best to guide you through that consideration.

More than ever before, it must now seem as if everybody wants something of you. Your parents, of course, want you to be happy — but they also want you to be independent, employed (ideally established in a prestigious and rewarding career), and out of the house. Employers want you to be well trained (for the jobs of the present and future) and ready to work — very hard and with real commitment. And governments want you contributing to society and paying lots of taxes (mostly to support your parents and grandparents in their retirement, for which we thank you).

In much of the modern world — certainly in our world — achievement has become the exception rather than the norm. Ours is increasingly the world that Malcolm Gladwell describes, in Outliers, where he argues that the most talented individuals in any field must spend 10,000 hours practising to hone their skills to the highest possible level. How many do this? How many become masters of the golf course, or the operating theatre, or the concert hall? People such as Sidney Crosby and Serena Williams, maybe — but not many. But of course this was always true: there were never very many masters. If you are one of those truly stellar individuals, you are special — and, as long as you continue to challenge yourself, you are destined for a successful life.

Fifty years ago there were a great many people in Canada who worked hard at an early age to master difficult skills and meet a tough standard: studying Latin and preparing for the provincial examinations which were a prerequisite for high school graduation. Now, however, we live in an age where the pressure has been torqued back, where children are allowed to perform at their own level; if they think the task facing them is stupid or too tough, they are excused from trying.

Today’s Canadian youth have the luxury of a more leisurely transition into adulthood. Our high school graduates are spared the high-profile, high-stress, study for years until final examination hell system that East Asian high school graduates endure. They are not pushed hard by their teachers. After all, students in Alberta were given a break when the province ruled that teachers were not allowed to assign zeros, even when students fail to complete an assignment (arguably one of the silliest ideas in a modern school system full of silly things). Most parents see it as their duty to insulate their teenage children from the challenges of adulthood, seeking instead to launch them gently into a confusing, complex, and surprisingly unwelcoming world.

That being said, we fully recognize that not all of you have arrived at this moment easily. Those of you who come from families living in poverty or family crisis, are moving from rural and remote areas, or are continuing the transitions of immigration have had very different experiences. You know only too well the realities of contemporary Canadian life; consequently, you will head into adulthood with your eyes wide open.

So, young person, why is everyone so worried about you? You are eighteen years old or nearly so, in the final semester of high school. You might be able to vote, enlist in the army, drive a car, drink, and otherwise act like an adult. You and your friends are tired of your parents, teachers, and guidance counsellors lecturing endlessly about university, colleges, and jobs. Although you don’t like to admit it, you are nervous, too. If you aren’t, you should be. It is hard to miss all the talk about the collapsing middle class, youth unemployment, government debt, climate change, and all the other things that just make you want to stay in high school forever.

The World around You

It seems unfair, doesn’t it? You are heading into adulthood at a very difficult time. Life may not be easy. Demographers claim you may have a lower life expectancy than your parents (too much junk food and too little exercise). The financial misdeeds of your parents’ generation, compounded by the spending habits of the baby boomers, mean that you are inheriting huge obligations that will dog you for the rest of your lives. And those wonderful technological innovations — the ones that put a smartphone in your hands, that allow you to share movies and music for free (but not, we hope, this book) — are also transforming the world of work by eliminating more jobs than they create.

It wasn’t so long ago that the rewards of graduating from high school were more or less guaranteed. Even those who didn’t finish grade twelve could do reasonably well. As recently as the 1970s, there was a good deal of decently paid work to be found in the nation’s factories, construction sites, fisheries, mines, and logging camps. A trades ticket or a college diploma was solid preparation for a well-paid life. A university degree was an even better ticket. Some of the country’s major employers — Eaton’s, Simpsons-Sears, the big banks, governments at all levels, the armed forces — hired for potential as much as skill and offered training and career progression for graduates from our universities.

Canada is a great place to live. We aren’t as rich as Dubai or Macao, but in all of the top measures of the human condition that matter — life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, educational attainment, distribution of income, safety, and the like — this is one of the top nations in the world. There is a reason why Canada is one of the leading destinations for immigrants and, as evidence of our national compassion, refugees as well. The country dodged a major bullet during the 2007–08 global financial crisis and is the envy of most of the world in terms of its government budgets and level of debt.

So, why worry? Canada has an enviable standard of living and quality of life, and abundant natural wealth. Despite issues that sometimes dominate media attention, such as the Senate spending scandal in the fall of 2013, our public institutions — Parliament, bureaucracy, courts, police, and armed forces — are among the most trustworthy, accountable, and honourable anywhere. Whatever the country’s shortcomings, and these are obvious and not few, you are coming into adulthood into one of the richest, most peaceful, safest, and, dare we admit it, greatest nations on the planet.

There are some gloomy spots, of course. Aboriginal people do not share in the nation’s prosperity, particularly if they live in isolated communities. There are pockets of real economic hardship across the country: one-industry towns without an industry, rural and remote communities that offer few economic opportunities, once-thriving fishing communities destroyed by the decline of coastal fisheries, and working-class segments of industrial cities that are now pock-marked by abandoned factories. Many new Canadians, including thousands with diplomas and advanced degrees that are not recognized by Canadian employers, struggle to find secure and decent jobs. All countries have pockets of economic distress and Canada is no different, but we do offer various government support programs to ensure that even people without work have some measure of support.

Another part of the problem rests inside Canadian companies. Over the past few decades, Canada has lagged behind other industrial nations in productivity and competitiveness. Put simply, Canadian workers and companies do not produce as much per unit of work or input as do our main competitors. In the past, Canadian factories operated behind substantial tariff walls that gave domestic companies a substantial financial advantage over firms from other countries. They could be less efficient and produce items at a higher cost than other countries and still sell more cheaply in the Canadian market. However, in the era of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the recently