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| By Samantha
Schmidt |
| OTTAWA
| Oct.
17, 2008 — As
the economy slows down, experts predict interest in post-secondary education
will soar upwards.
Continuing one's studies or going back to school is often thought of as the safe and "sensible" thing to do when we enter a recession, says economist Simon Power.
At the height of Alberta's oil boom, "people sort of left high school before they graduated because they were able to find jobs that paid well," says the Carleton University professor. "A lot of those kids are going to be laid off and hopefully will go back to school." David Johnston, the associate vice-provost at the University of Calgary, agrees. While it's too early to know how many students will apply for fall 2009, he expects the numbers to be higher compared to enrolment this year. "In the past five years, the employment market has been good for people coming out of high school," he says. But because of dropping oil prices, Johnston says he expects more applications for the next academic school year. Johnston says the university will try to accommodate more students, but space in many of its degree programs is limited. Simply not enough space Demand for spots in universities may go up, but that doesn't necessarily mean that enrolment will increase too, says Herb O'Heron, senior advisor for national affairs at the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada.
"It has an impact on the demand," he says, but not on how many spots universities can supply. "It's who gets in and not how many get in," he explains. Universities need to have the room and the money to accommodate more students, he says, and since most of a university's funds come from the government, increased enrolment depends on how much support provincial and federal governments are willing to provide. In the past, he says, universitites have responded by increasing enrolment, with or without extra government funding. When the Canadian economy was stagnant during the early 1980s, enrolment increased dramatically, he says. From 1980 to 1983, the number of full-time Canadian students increased by almost 20 per cent, and then evened out, growing by about five per cent between 1983 and 1986. Enrolment in universities jumped by about 17 per cent between 1987 and 1992, when the economy started to decline again. A safe haven in graduate school O'Heron says a large part of increased enrolment is due to students deciding to stay in school.
Ian Lee, a business professor at Carleton University, agrees. He says universities can only take on some additional students in times of heightened demand. He says that some general degrees in the arts, humanities and social sciences "can just make first year classes bigger," but, for the most part, post-secondary institutions can't take on too many new students. But Lee doesn't expect increased interest from students coming out of high school in troubled economic times. Instead, he says that more university students will consider applying to graduate school. This is because university grads often find it hard to get a job during a market downturn, he says, and so they turn to graduate school to keep them occupied until the job market improves. His advice to graduating students worried about finding a job is to further their education. "You can sit at home watching soap operas all day and twiddle your thumbs or you can go to grad school and increase your intellectual capital," he says. O'Heron says with any kind of an increased interest in post-secondary education, governments should be investing more in education during a recession. "(In a recession,) they look a little longer term...one of the
things they can do is invest in human capital," he says. "Whether
they will or not is another question." |
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