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| Marie Snyder standing in a field. Image supplied by her, cropped by Bill Hulet |
This is another article where I use a short conversation with Marie Snyder to raise a few issues that I think are tremendously important.
I asked about competition because one of the least known of all open secrets is the fact that a surprising number of people who go to school to get specific skills that they can use to get a good job end up not working in their field of study. Take a look at the following graphic from the American Congressional Budget Office that shows where STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) graduates end up working.
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| Public Domain Image (click on it for a better quality version) |
Yeah, that's right. More than three quarters of graduates from STEM programs don't end up working in their field. That means that all the hyper-anxiety and resulting competitiveness that builds up in children and parents is pretty much misplaced.
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I became aware of this when I graduated with an undergraduate degree in 1981. The 1980s recession hit Ontario like a sledgehammer and it was tough finding a job. I went back to my home town---Woodstock---for Yule that year and the local beer hall was giving out free Turkey dinners. I went with a bunch of friends from high school. Of the bunch around the table, only two of us had jobs: myself (a philosophy grad) and one other guy who was a fine artist. Everyone else---who had all taken "serious" job-related courses---was out of work. This included people who had studied heavy-design diesel mechanics, engineering, etc, courses. As one person said "I never had any fun at all while at college and I still don't have a job!"
What I learned from this was something that should be obvious to everyone, but isn't. Training more people for a specific job doesn't create new positions for them to fill---it just increases the competition for those few jobs that already exist. This isn't to say that an education isn't important. As one business owner once explained to me. It doesn't matter what the field was, the fact someone was self-motivated to the point where they dragged themselves out of bed to go to lectures, was able to get essays and reports done on time, and, who did enough studying to pass the exams---shows that a kid has the bare minimum necessary to do lots of jobs. (The person I'm referring to ran a landscaping company but still tried to hire grads for the above reasons. He has a degree too.)
That means that any sort of post-secondary diploma is fast becoming the "base line" that gets people past the "first sort" of job applications. As Marie says, post-secondary fills the same function that having a high school diploma did when we were young.
Having said that, I think that probably the most important job skill that any young person can learn at any time is how to be "entrepreneurial". And, paradoxically, this seems to require exactly the opposite attitude from people who are trying to fashion themselves into a vocational "key" in the hope that they will fit into a specific employment "lock" when they graduate. That's because there really isn't any way for anyone to accurately predict what the world will look like when they get their degree or diploma.
Let me give you another example.
I had a friend once who had sought to get a really good trades job so he'd studied a very "cutting edge" technology at the college level. It gave him the ability to work numerically-controlled, precision machine tools. When he got the credentials he got a job---at the only factory in the province that actually used the machines he was trained on. It was owned by the Armed Forces and made weapons. He was making good money, but unfortunately he became a pacifist and was more and more upset about making things designed to kill people. But he knew he couldn't get a good job anywhere else. This meant that even though the game plan had "worked" for him, it didn't allow him the flexibility necessary to make a living in tune with his evolving belief system. (Luckily, he had married a teacher and the two of them decided it made sense for him to quit his job and stay at home to raise their two young daughters.)
This is an example of the problem with training for one particular type of skilled job. It "locks you in" to that particular field and if it goes through significant changes, you end up being like a sailor in port with no ships to sail on.
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The problem with treating university as the "first rung" on the job searching ladder is that not everyone has it in them to go to college or university. If we forced these institutions to take everyone who applies, the result would a degradation of the entire system because it would mean that the administration would have to put more and more resources into remedial help instead of rewarding excellence.
This leads back to that important truth hiding in plain sight that I mentioned before. A country cannot educate itself into full employment. If it were possible, then Canada would have attained zero unemployment long ago. That's because we have the highest percentage of college and university grads of any country in the world. According to the 2016 census:
In 2016, more than half (54.0%) of Canadians aged 25 to 64 had either college or university qualifications, up from 48.3% in 2006. Canada continues to rank first among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in the proportion of college and university graduates.
This is why Snyder raises the issue of a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI). In a world where automation is getting rid of those lower tier jobs that used to provide employment for the kids who dropped out of school or only had a high school diploma, it offers a "safety net". It also helps people who have some sort of entrepreneurial idea.
We already have something of a limited GAI in the form of the federal Canada Child Benefit (CCB), which ensures that each parent in Canada receives enough money to hopefully keep the entire family from falling into dire poverty. A few years back I hired a young man to trim some trees on my property. When we were working out the bill, he mentioned to me that the CCB had been absolutely crucial to him being able to get his business off the ground. If it hadn't been there, he said he thinks he'd have had to call it quits and get a job doing something else---just to provide for his young family.
He was able to use the CCB because he had children. But if he hadn't, there wouldn't have been anything similar to help him "bridge the hard times" during his start up. That's where it would actually help add a few more points to the percentage of people gainfully employed. But having said that, it isn't a "magic bullet" that will eliminate all unemployment. Some people simply won't be able to "thrive" in our modern world. And automation is grinding away at the total number of jobs. Making our workforce even more highly educated simply won't put food on the table or pay the rent---that's why we need a GAI, among other things (like a rational housing policy).
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This leads me to Snyder's last point in the above clip. There's a foundational fear among a lot of Canadians that is fuelling a competitive drive among parents, who then pass this on to their children. The idea is that if children don't "get to the head of the pack" early on, their chances of becoming successful in life will only diminish as they get older. This sort of general fearfulness is corrosive to society and discourages the solidarity that is essential to getting out of the collective hole that we are already in and digging deeper every day.
The problem is that there are "islands of stability" in the behaviour of groups. That is, certain behaviours can be self-perpetuating, and lack of trust can be one of them. If people don't trust themselves or others, they start to make decisions based on that lack of trust that only reinforces other people's lack of trust. This causes these others to do things that then reinforces the lack of trust in the first person. And as a result, things start to "lock up" in society.
Economists understand this problem with regard to consumer demand. That's why governments all over the world have been showering borrowed money on their citizenry. This is because advisors have been telling them that if they don't do this the destruction of savings will traumatize consumers and keep them from spending even after they get their jobs back---just like the great depression convinced many of our grandparents and great grandparents to be very careful with money until the end of their lives.
Unfortunately, there has been such a huge over-emphasis on individualism in our lifetimes that modern governments seem to have totally lost any idea that our nations need a collective sense of solidarity if we are going to be able to thrive as individuals. I suspect that a large part of this has come from two very different sources. First, during the 1960s there was a tremendous "cultural revolution" that came about because of people in my generation rebelling against the intense social conservatism that our parents manifested---probably because of their experiences in the Great Depression and World War II. More recently, the Neo-Liberal Consensus that emerged during the Reagan/Thatcher years has convinced an entire generation of politicians that the marketplace is the only decision-making body that should have any influence on human life.
Here's an excerpt from a World War Two army training video that shows how it is possible to make an excellent argument for the need to co-operate instead of compete if we are going to make any progress as a nation. I just wish that the people in Ottawa and Queen's Park had some similar inkling of how important this issue can be in a properly functioning society.
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