"Canada must streamline education to turn degrees into jobs"

Here's a brief excerpt of a piece from the Calgary Herald:

The overabundance of general degree graduates in Canada has led to dismal underemployment figures, Ms. Bell explains. “What statistics don’t tell you is that the system is churning out more BAs than we can possibly absorb. In fact, OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] ranks Canada as No. 2 in underemployment of youth. Only Spain is ahead at 50%.”

This suggests a large number of Canadian youth are getting jobs for which they are overqualified. “That’s not something to be proud of,” she says. “We should be asking ourselves, is that really the best we can do in Canada?”

The Scandinavian countries, Germany, Switzerland and Australia have produced much better employment outcomes. Ironically, these are also regions where the number of students graduating with university degrees is far lower (typically 20% to 30% depending on the country).

I'm not sure what statistics she's looking at. The OECD Youth Unemployment rate as a percentage of the youth labor force (ages 15 - 24) is below the OECD average. That said, most in the 15-24 age range won't have the BAs she's critiquing the excess of. I just haven't been able to find better statistical data and I don't really have the time for an in-depth search. I would agree though that college has been oversold to quote another article's title. As it notes (albeit for the US instead of Canada):

In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.

As the headline of a recent New York Times article notes - It Takes a B.A. to Find a Job as a File Clerk - we really do need to find some better way to funnel people into jobs.

One way to increase the ratio of women in STEM majors would be to decrease the size of the non-STEM university programs, thus making them harder to get into and likely less appealing as a prospect. (As many of these majors have a strong female majority, doing so would likely even out the gender-balance across the institution as a whole). Such cuts might also help lessen the shortage of people in areas like trades - there's plenty of value to work that doesn't require a university education. There'll be criticism of the sort found in this earlier article:

A focus solely on “applied research” that supplies short-term results misses the importance of basic research and academic work that leads to long-term economic success, said the University of Lethbridge neuroscience professor.

... "It sounds to me like they’re going to directed program funding, and only fund certain institutions that have immediate job opportunities. To me, that’s a concern. We’ve always seen the university system as a place that people can go to continue learning a broad range of subjects,” [Liberal MLA Kent Hehr] said.

Roger Pielke alludes to some of this thinking as faith-based science policy - at least as far as that University of Lethbridge neuroscience professor's comments go. Ironically, to quote Pielke, back when the term was coined around 1920 'basic research' "ironically enough meant what we today call 'applied research.'"

While I agree that social science, humanities, and some of the research with fewer-immediate-practical implications remains important, I'm left wondering the following: are they important enough for society to have doubled the number of students studying these areas (and thus to a certain extent the funding of the area) over the past 20-30 years while simultaneously having roughly as many students in STEM majors as society had the same 20-30 years ago? Would it make sense to go back to the ratio of 25 years ago? Let me leave you with a bit more of College has been oversold:

In 2009 the U.S. graduated 37,994 students with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information science. This is not bad, but we graduated more students with computer science degrees 25 years ago! The story is the same in other technology fields such as chemical engineering, math and statistics. Few fields have changed as much in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor’s degrees in microbiology — about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance?