With university students increasingly burdened with debt after graduation, getting a post-secondary education might seem an excessively expensive endeavour. But the latest Statistics Canada data suggests that higher education remains a Canadian’s best insurance policy for remaining in the labour force.
Results from the monthly Labour Force Survey for the first five months of 2012 continue to show that people with higher levels of education have remained more employable than those with less education. The number of employed B.C. residents 25 to 54 years of age with a university degree or a post-secondary certificate or diploma has averaged above 83% this year, well above the average B.C. employment rate of 61.2%.
The jobless rate for the same age group in B.C. has averaged 5.2% for those with a university degree and 5.4% for those with a post-secondary certificate or diploma. Meanwhile, B.C. residents with only a high school diploma have had an average unemployment rate of 6.9% thus far this year.
The participation rate for British Columbians with higher education is also strong: nearly 90% of those with a post-secondary diploma or university degree are in the workforce.
But B.C. faces increasing competition to keep its educated workforce in the province. According to the latest jobs data produced by BC Stats, it’s become increasingly difficult to find employment in key high-paying service jobs in sectors ranging from health care to management, business and finance. The unemployment rates in these sectors have hovered between 1.4% and 2.4% so far this year, suggesting these sectors are at full employment in B.C.
With Alberta facing an acute skills shortage, the highly educated are increasingly being lured to the more promising prospects on the other side of the Rocky Mountains. The eastward brain drain might also be stimulated by new federal employment insurance changes that will force people to take lower paying jobs.
With such prospects for the educated unemployed in B.C., who wouldn’t go east where the job opportunities are greater and the average pay is much higher? •
