Stephen Ducharme | David McKie

MILLENNIALS, UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE POST-SECONDARY HANGOVER

STEPHEN DUCHARME

DATA FEATURE

DEC. 13, 2013

1590 Words

http://journal.edumedia.ca/duch0078/WordPress/

[What follows is my data feature on youth unemployment and education. This feature is meant to be presented in web form, on a four-tab format meant to segment the information and stories. In this format, a bold header will indicate a new tab]

[For David, my graphic data presentation has been compiled using the following sources. For the jpeg Total Population of Workforce with University Degree in Ontario, the information was created using the labour force survey conducted by Statistics Canada. CANSIM Table 281-0209, located at the following site…

http://www5.statcan.gc.ca/cansim/pick-choisir?lang=eng&p2=33&id=2820209

Ontario25UniEmployment

The data for these graphs were first streamlined on the Stats Canada site, removing unnecessary columns before being exported to excel. Pivot tables were used to compare the differences in identified employment between 2003-2012 before that data was recompiled and installed into Adobe Illustrator for presentation.

The fusion table, Growth of Post-Secondary Graduates from 1990-2012 by Province is available at this link…

https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1SbxuLqwsipQLzBGzZYVvglTiT4dQ4R9pNny6c2Q – map:id=3

The table compares completed post-secondary, in any form (diplomas, degrees, certificates), in 1990 to 2012. Provinces are heat-mapped to indicate the greatest growth. The information was compiled from the same Stats Canada table (CANSIM 281-0209) but using different variables compiled originally in Excel.]

Millennials, Unemployment and the Post-Secondary Hangover

WHO ARE MILLENNIALS?

What does it mean to be a young adult of the up and coming generation? Surveys conducted nationally point to a generation at odds with the working world. The education of adults in their twenties is at an all time high yet unemployment in their post-secondary lives is rampant.

Part-time employment, volunteer work and internships are filling a period of life that has traditionally been the beginning of their income earning lives.

Millennials, as they’ve be coined in the media, people in their mid to late twenties are dealing with crippling debt, multiple degrees and no jobs to show for it. What does this say of our country? Where is our society going? These questions are defining our era.

A profile of three individuals from three very different walks of life, along with statistical data, will showcase the problems of our countries inheritors. Failures, confusion and some success stories point to a flawed but enormously complex generation that struggles with an identity after their post-secondary tenures.

ERICAS STORY

Erica Walker is sick and eats a quick meal before starting her shift at a local restaurant. She has been on the move all day, coming to the restaurant after a full day substitute teaching at an elementary school.

She also has another job bartending at the Canadian Tire Place to make ends meet.

Erica’s employment situation is a growing trend among many people her age. According to the Statistics Canada labour force survey, Ontario has seen a 45 percent growth in part-time only employment among young adults with university education since 2003.

“It’s exhausting,” says Walker. “I could be up at 6 a.m., teach until 3:30 p.m. to be at my other job for 4:30 p.m. and be there until 1:30 a.m. Repeat.”

Still, the fact she has a substitute-teaching job makes her feel fortunate. She looks down at the table and then around the restaurant.

“I don’t hate this place as much as I used too because I was working all day every day here. Now I’m only working some nights here and spending my days teaching.”

Her mindset is based on first hand experience within Ontario’s competitive teaching market. According to internal polls by Ontario’s College of Teachers published in a 2011 report, 67 percent of teachers entering the job market are either unemployed or underemployed.

That figure has grown over 30 percent since 2006.

Furthermore, the polls only take into account teachers in their first year, meaning the annual tally is exponentially growing as teachers try to weather this job shortage with new competition entering the market every year.

It took Walker three years to get her on-call teaching job. While feeling fortunate, those extra years took their toll on her psyche and her ideals of a career.

“I was pretty deflated,” says Walker. “After being told growing up that if you got a university degree you get the better jobs, that whole ideal, and then none of that panning out.”

At 26, Walker already has two degrees completed through Windsor and Brock University, along with supplementary modules for teaching she continually upgrades through Queens.

She also has at least a few years navigating the substitute lists before she can even be considered for a full-time position.

She is also dealing with the debt of her education.

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to work out. Walker is concerned about her future, and feels the pressure of her parent’s generation.

“Where I’m at, at 26, is five years behind where my parents were at my age,” explains Walker. “My brother was born. My parents had a child and a house.”

“You want at least what your parents had. They want you to have more. This generation is stuck. I’m not going to be able to build what my parents had in the time that they built it.”

She finds irony in that, in her mind, the same generation as her parents is preventing her from moving into full-time employment.

“There is a lot of double-dipping,” says Walker. “A lot of them [teachers] retire from their job and come back as supply teachers, which takes away our entry level jobs.”

She mentions there is talk within the union and government to consider a mandatory retirement age, a long-term solution to an immediate problem.

When asked if she feels, at the end of the day, she will enjoy the same quality of life as her parents she provides a quick answer.

“No.”

TAYLOR’S STORY

It’s midnight and Taylor MacLeod thanks her last customer of the night as they leave the bar.

She’s been working at the same establishment all through her tenure at the University of Ottawa, but it’s been a year since she graduated and she’s starting to feel anxious.

“My first goal after I graduated was to travel.” Says MacLeod. “Did I expect to have a career right after I came back? Absolutely not.”

“If I have to do this for a bit I don’t mind, but I would have hoped not to still be here.”

MacLeod, 25 years old, has ambitions to be a detective. She graduated with a Bachelor in Criminology and has applied to the RCMP but with no success.

She now volunteers at the Elizabeth Fry Society of Ottawa for troubled women.

“I do it because I like it, and it looks good on the resume,” she says.

MacLeod is one of many post-university graduates struggling to get a foothold in the workforce. Many supplement their lack of success professionally with volunteer or unpaid internship work.

In Canada, hard statistics on how many millennials opt for this route are non-existent. However, the topic has become a legitimate concern and talking point when discussing the generation.

In a recent interview on CBC Radio’s Ontario Today. Toronto labour lawyer Andrew Langille estimated there are between 50,000 to 100,000 illegal internships in Ontario every year.

“In the wake of the global economic crisis, many employers took that as a cue to start replacing paid employees with unpaid ones,” said Langille.

People of MacLeod’s age group are the most educated generation to date. According to Vital Sign’s 2012 report, Generation Flux, high school dropout rates are 11 percent in affluent areas.

As well, according to the Statistics Canada’s 2012 Labour Force Survey, over 40 percent of Canadian young adults over 25 have some form of post-secondary education.

As a resource, the academic aptitude of millennials and the current lack of entry level full-time jobs raise the question addressed by Langille of whether or not the generation is being exploited for free labour.

For MacLeod, she feels mislead about the potential job opportunities coming out of university.

“Well I knew I would be going to university in high school and I thought I would get a career right out of university, or maybe a co-op position that would lead to a career,” says MacLeod.

“The job prospects in this day and age are not even close to what my parents had.”

Because of this, MacLeod feels obligated to continue volunteer work until the jobs become available.

MATTHEW’S STORY

At 28, Matthew Buttler is well into a career with Ottawa web-startup company Shopify.com.

He got married in the summer and is looking into buying a house. For him, everything is on the right track.

“I’m lucky as hell I have a full-time job,” he says.

His educational background however may leave you confused as to how he ended up as consultant.

“I have a BA in English and Music as a double-major. I also have a diploma in Sonic Design, and after my undergrad I enrolled in a bachelor of education program at Ottawa U,” Buttler explains.

“You have to be practical. I knew I wasn’t going to get anything with just an English degree.”

That practicality extended to open-mindedness when it came to employment. As an e-commerce consultant, Buttler’s success in the private sector has changed his understanding of his youth and the generation to which he belongs.

“We all expected to be smarter than maybe we really are,” he explains.

“We all studied what we were interested in,” says Buttler, referring to fine arts degrees. “We were a bunch of spoiled kids, we did what we wanted to do and our parents foot the bill.”

“Now we are seeing the by-product of that.”

Buttler is reluctant to get into any comparisons of his age group to the unemployment challenges faced over two decades ago.

A university trained literature major and having studied Douglas Coupland’s book, Generation X, Buttler saw broad strokes in similarity but believes the context between the generations is different.

“The overeducated and underpaid thing, yeah that’s true. But they saw the writing on the wall, and you had a labour force develop around the computer boom.”

There is evidence to support his statement. In a comparison of university educated young adults from 1990 to 2012 Canada has seen a 14 percent increase, using Statistics Canada data. Unemployment in 2012 among this group is higher as well than it was in 1990.

‘Soft’ degrees are becoming an argument by some to explain youth unemployment. In a column for the Toronto Star entitled Is there any point in arts degrees, Robin Levinson outlines that practicality and higher learning are perhaps twos different things.

Buttler understands the challenges posed with having such a degree. However enlightening it is, it doesn’t teach any practical skills for the job market. Responsibility for him is the first step.

“It’s our burden to bear.”