In the short span since I last graduated in 2007, annual tuition for full-time science students at the University of Ottawa had jumped from $4,786.65 to $6,342.08. A 32% increase. I don’t ever remember paying less than $5,500, but I’m going by the tuition posted on the University of Ottawa website for that year and program.
As a point of comparison, minimum wage in Ontario increased by 7% over the same period, or from $9.50 to $10.25. It used to be that you could work during university and come out of it without significant debt, if any. Now it is expected for students to be saddled with debts greater than the average Canadian annual salary.
Yet even as university education is becoming less affordable, it is becoming more necessary. The undergraduate degree has displaced the high school diploma as the minimum barrier of entry to white-collar work. The Master’s degree meanwhile has filled the void left by the undegrad, and I see it as a requirement on more and more mainstream jobs.
We rank amongst the most educated citizenry of the world, and it’s as if we don’t know what to do with it. Employers are raising the education requirements for job postings because the work pool can sustain it, even though the jobs themselves haven’t changed.
In fact, many employers seem to be more enamoured with the idea of their staff having a university education than the contents of that education. How many jobs have you seen listing an undergraduate degree as a requirement but with little care as to which one? Is the employer better served because the person who fills spreadsheets all day has a Philosophy degree? How many stories have we heard from new graduates where the continuation of their role at a company wasn’t dependent on their competency, which they had satisfied, but whether they had obtained a diploma by a given date?
It’s as if the undergraduate degree has become no more than a license to apply for white collar work.
We’re caught in this cycle whereby we get educated because the market demands it, while the market demands it because we get educated. Unless something gives, students are going to eventually fork over $20k/year for tuition for nothing more than the privilege of avoiding automatic rejection by HR software.
I’m not saying that education is without value. It’s that that value is rendered meaningless when all that is cared about is a piece of paper rather than what it symbolizes. When competency takes second place to technicalities. When computers reject people not on a basis of qualifications, but rather if they had the right set of letters beside the field written “education.”
Most desk jobs out there should be open to people with high school diplomas. If you have the right experience and competency from years working in the field, you should be able to apply for a position without fear that a computer will dump you for having the “wrong” university degree.
More educated Canadians is a good thing. But I believe that how our society has come to exploit this fact is to its own detriment. We need to figure out what education means to us, and develop a vision for how we can harness it the best way possible.
Charts from the Canadian Federation of Students.