This September, like every year, a new group of high school graduates headed to college or university to pursue higher education. But today’s generation of students is in for a very different experience from the ones their parents had. On campuses across the country shiny new buildings are popping up,
Continue readingTag: young workers
The Progressive Economics Forum: We can do better
So there were 52,000 new jobs in September, but we needed 72,500 to keep up with labour force growth. 33,800 of those jobs were self-employed workers, and none of those jobs were for workers under 25. In the past year, men over 25 have been adding full time jobs, with
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Happy Crashiversary! Are you better off now than you were four years ago?
Four years after Lehman Brothers collapsed, it’s time to take stock of things by asking a stock political question: Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Where you stand on the answer depends on where you sit. Many people, businesses and communities are still struggling to
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Measuring Youth Unemployment
Miles Corak has a great post up about Paul Krugman’s “favourite gauge” of unemployment, the employment rate. Looking at the ratio of employed to population for working age men, he shows that the employment recovery in Canada appears to have stalled, moving very little since January 2011. The graph below
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: July Job Numbers Fall
Statistics Canada’s monthly job numbers are out, and it doesn’t look great. After big jumps in March and April, there was little change in May and June. In July, total employment fell by 30,000, mostly due to a fall in the numbers of women part-time workers over 55. The unemployment
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Youth employment trends
As a follow-up to my last post, where I showed R7 – the unemployment rate that includes involuntary part-time, I was curious what the longer term trend was regarding youth and part-time employment. As you can see in the graph below, the proportion of 20-24 year olds engaged in full-time
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Canada’s Self-Imposed Crisis in Post-Secondary Education
On June 7, I gave a keynote address to the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees Education Sector Conference. My PowerPoint presentation (with full references) can be found at this link. Points I raised in the address include the following: -Canada’s economy has been growing quite steadily over the past three
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Youth Unemployment
Here’s the link to a TVO The Agenda panel I was on this Friday. Good to put some focus on the fact that the “real” unemployment rate for young people is 20%, while the youth employment rate is down a full five percentage points from 2007. My basic take is
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Quebec Students: “Faire Leur Juste Part”
Simon Tremblay-Pepin, an emerging social policy scholar, has recently blogged here (in French) about Quebec tuition fees. He points out that, when one adjusts for inflation, Quebec tuition fees are headed into uncharted territory. Indeed, contrary to some recent spin from the Charest government, Tremblay-Pepin makes two important observations: 1.
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Discussing Quebec Student Protests on Talk Radio
Last Friday, I blogged here about the Quebec student protests. Subsequently, I was invited to appear on 580 CFRA News Talk Radio, with hosts Rob Snow and Lowell Green. I should note that Mr. Green is the author of several books, including: -How the Granola Crunching, Tree Hugging Thug Huggers
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Rex Murphy’s Naive Take on the Quebec Student Protests
On CBC’s The National last night, Rex Murphy weighed in on Quebec’s student protests; the transcript can be found here, and the three-minute video here. He calls the protests “short sighted,” points out that Quebec already has the lowest tuition fees in Canada, and suggests the students’ actions are “crude attempts
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Who’s a bigger drag on Canada’s future? The old or the young?
This is my latest column for Canadian Business magazine. Giorgio, a hard-working, smart-as-a-whip University of Toronto student, asked me a great question after a recent guest lecture: What if the biggest challenge facing Canadian businesses and governments in the coming years isn’t an aging society but the economic and fiscal
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Katimavik
I am sure readers of this blog are not unsympathetic to the case for a government supported program which, at a time of very high youth unemployment, annually enables some 1500 young people to volunteer to work in not for profit sponsored community development projects across the country. Participants- aged
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: The Affordability of Post-Secondary Education
Carleton University’s Ted Jackson teaches a graduate seminar course on post-secondary education in Carleton’s School of Public Policy and Administration. Earlier this month, I was invited to give a guest presentation to Professor Jackson’s class. I focused the presentation on affordability challenges faced by students wanting to pursue post-secondary education.
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: New Generation of Thinkers Link Inequality, Innovation and Prosperity
<em>This guest blog was written by Mike Marin and Anouk Dey. It originally appeared in the Toronto Star on February 24. The authors are part of a team that produced the report Prospering Together (in English http://bit.ly/z4GQx5 and in French http://bit.ly/yabiK2) </em> <em></em>What do the Occupy Movement and Canadian software
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: “Real” Youth Unemployment Rate Close to 20%
Statistics Canada’s “real” (R8 supplementary) unemployment rate adds to unemployed persons some labour force dropouts (discouraged job seekers who have given up looking for a job in the belief that no work is available) and the hours of work lost by part-time workers who would rather have worked full-time. In
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Sitting on the Sidelines: Young Workers Miss Out on the Recovery
As is well known, the youth unemployment rate remains high, and well above average. It stood at 14.1% in November or more than double the unemployment rate of 6.3% for persons aged 25 to 54, and 6.2% for those aged 55 and over. What is a little bit more surprising
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Federal Post-Secondary Education Act
Last month, the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) released a document entitled Public Education for the Public Good: A National Vision for Canada’s Post-Secondary Education System. I found the document to be quite informative, filled with a lot of useful statistics. For example: -Enrolment is rising in colleges and universities across Canada. Since the late 1990s, full-time enrolment has […]
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Student Debt Rising Amongst New Physicians
Newly-released data indicate that student debt is rising amongst new physicians in Canada. In 2010, 23 percent of medical residents surveyed estimated having more than $120,000 in education-related debt upon completion of their residency traning (as compared with just 17 percent in 2007). (Note: across Canada, average tuition fees for medical students amount to just over $10,000 a year.) This appears […]
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: William Watson on PSE
On Wednesday, William Watson wrote a comment piece in the Financial Post in which he was critical of Armine Yalnizyan’s recent essay on inequality that appeared the National Post. In his piece, Mr. Watson alleges that Armine “is guilty of fantastical reminiscence,” particularly with respect to her take on post-secondary education (PSE). Among other things, Mr. Watson […]
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