BC post-secondary students are getting an education in debt accumulation earlier and earlier these days.
The trouble is that not much supplementary instruction is being passed along on how to avoid getting into debt in the first place and how to get out of it once you’re in it.
Sounds like the same curriculum a lot of numerically retarded sovereign states around the globe are using today.
As far as that post-secondary book-learning is concerned, more students need more informed counselling on where they should be investing their time once they leave high school.
The public education curriculum incorporates next to no instruction in basic personal money management. So it’s not surprising that so many of the public school system’s clientele take the wrong turn once they’re rolled off the high-school conveyor belt.
Here’s a question they should have an answer to when they get that Grade 12 diploma: is a university education the right choice for them?
In a lot of cases, I’d say no. So would the calluses-on-hands end of the economy.
The Industry Training Authority’s (ITA) recent Youth Day speaks to that reality. The conference was aimed at getting more B.C. youth in trades training.
According to the ITA’s press material, Metro Vancouver alone will have more than 70,000 job vacancies in trades by 2019.
Stokers of the immigration industry engines would have most of those vacancies filled by imported HR. Leave academia to the soft-handed locals. They’re getting used to drifting along expecting to get something for nothing and falling deeper in debt.
The ITA, however, wants to tap human resources that are already to hand – B.C. students and youth, for starters.
The latter should consider those ITA appeals, because there’s a good living to be made in trades work.
Meanwhile, aimless wandering down the halls of academe will yield a whole lotta debt for the unwary.
According to Joseph Berger’s The Price of Knowledge Student Debt in Canada report for the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation, more than half of Canadian students graduate with debt.
In 2009, Berger writes, university undergraduates who borrowed to pay for their studies graduated owing an average of $26,680; for college graduates, the figure was $13,600.
For some that debt might be worth the investment; for others not so much.
As Berger points out, the $20 billion in outstanding student debt in Canada is a serious concern for students and their sponsors. The economy will likewise be more than a little anxious about yet another source of unpaid bills.
Higher education’s marketplace value is also unsettling. Daily Reckoning writer Eric Fry points out in a recent dispatch that college graduation in the United States has suffered serious marketplace devaluation over the past few years. He points to National Association of Colleges and Employers numbers showing that while more than half of all 2007 college graduates who had applied for a job had received an offer by graduation day, that percentage had dropped to less than 20% last year.
Meanwhile, young people with trades training, having had their schooling bankrolled by a union or sponsoring company, usually graduate debt-free into jobs that offer good pay and benefits.
As SFU professor of marketing Lindsay Meredith once pointed out to your scribe: “A lot of these [skilled trades] guys can earn salaries that can put a professor to shame.”
You don’t need a university degree to appreciate the value of that.