Time to Rethink The Way We Fund Higher Education
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…
young workers
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…
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?…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…