CAROLINE ALPHONSO

The Globe and Mail

October 18, 2010

For all the debate about whether Canada is plowing too many students through universities and colleges, new research shows that higher education pays.

 

The gap in earnings between post-secondary graduates and those who completed only high school nearly doubled over 20 years, says a report being released on Monday by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, a provincial agency.

 

The result has prompted the researchers to call for governments to step up their efforts to educate young teenagers about the benefits of earning a degree.

 

The private return on holding a degree or diploma may be obvious. But there’s also a strong public benefit: As the Canadian economy restructures, a creative and highly educated work force is crucial, making post-secondary credentials all the more important.

 

“My approach as an economist is to measure the demand for something by the price it fetches,” said Torben Drewes, author of the report and professor of economics at Trent University. “If there is an excess supply of these types of skills, the price should fall. The opposite is happening.”

 

Using census data from Statistics Canada, Prof. Drewes found the earnings gap widened considerably between 1986 and 2006: College graduates in Ontario between the ages of 21 and 30 earned on average 25 per cent more than people who were only high-school grads, up from 12 per cent two decades earlier. The wage gap between university graduates and those with only a high-school diploma climbed to 50 per cent from about 30 per cent. Although the data refer to Ontario students, Prof. Drewes said the findings can be applied across the country.

 

Prof. Drewes said taxpayers may be questioning whether it’s worth spending millions on new university buildings and classrooms. Enrolment among men and women in Ontario, for example, has increased by 43 per cent and 91 per cent, respectively, in two decades. But he said the data prove that there isn’t an over-supply of highly educated Canadians in the market.

 

“Are we getting a good bang for our social investment buck? The answer is very positive,” he said. “This will certainly make the case that there is something to be said for continuing to expand participation in post-secondary education. One of the avenues to do that is preparation earlier on.”

 

Education experts have recently been calling for a strategy built into the elementary- and middle-school years that encourages adolescents and teens to start choosing career paths with the possibility of attending college or university. A study last month showed that many young teenagers set their sights on university or college earlier than once believed – before Grade 9.

 

That means financial barriers, which have largely been tackled, play just as important a role as attitudes about post-secondary education.

 

A small, yet notable, movement is afoot to help adolescents and teens recognize the value of a higher education. Pathways to Education, a successful stay-in-school program for high-school students in Toronto, has reduced dropout rates and helped kids in tough neighbourhoods go on to university and college. And a handful of universities hold campus tours for under-represented groups or visit high schools in low-income areas.

 

But educators worry that it’s not nearly enough, and hope that data – such the report released by Prof. Drewes – add ammunition in their fight to encourage governments to take action, and to convince students of the benefits of attending university and college.

 

“What some of the programs have shown us so far is we understand the problem better, and we have some success stories. Now we have to ramp it up to a much larger scale and the government can help us do this,” said Harvey Weingarten, president of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario and former president of the University of Calgary.

 

“We need a population that is innovative, entrepreneurial, highly educated. That’s what attracts the companies. That’s what creates the jobs. It goes beyond the individual interest. It goes to a public imperative if we want to prosper.”