Post-secondary education is increasing in population with 28 percent of Canadians attending such in 2006, compared to only 13 percent in 1981 (pg. 230). This relates to credential inflation of education, which refers to the decreased value of a university degree. It doesn’t seem to be worth as much as it used to be generations ago. Canada is also one of the countries that allots the most GDP to education- a total of 6.1 percent (pg. 231)
One reason for the increase of post-secondary degrees is due to “an expansion of ‘white-collar’ positions that target educated semi-professionals in administrative or office positions” (pg. 230). We can see that more and more jobs require at least a university degree of some sort. As discussed in the video that we watched in class, there is a steady increase in technology-based jobs. The text states that “a key feature of such economies is that the workers must be able to continuously adapt to and learn new technologies” (pg.230). Although there are pros and cons, computers and robots are now able to do jobs that humans were once needed to perform. A downfall of this is that it is effecting the job market in a huge way because people are losing their jobs and there are not as many job opportunities available. Something that I found staggering from a video we watched in class was that 4 online company’s (which I can’t remember right now) total employees were less than 20,000 and could fit in Madison Square Garden!
One nice thing about the teaching profession, as far as I’m thinking is that we will always have a job. The day when robots take over teaching would be a very sad day!
Discussion question: With more and more people with university degrees not being able to find jobs, should we be encouraging our up and coming generation to go after more apprenticeship programs or co-operative education?
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