Employees Wanted.

A whole generation is starting to retire and that should lead the way to plenty of jobs for today's youth, but it's been a rocky road for the last decade

A decade ago, young Canadians were supremely confident about their financial futures. A third of the 18-to-29 year olds surveyed in 1991 expected to be pretty well off by 2001: they thought they would own their own home, have up to $100,000 away in savings, and earn $50,000 to $100,000 a year. This was at a time when people with a Master of Business Administration degree or law degree were earning about $30,000 a year to start.

But, the decade turned out to be a bit disappointing for many of those teens.

According to the Canadian Council on Social Development report, Progress 2000: 60% of 16-year-olds in Canada have never had a paying job, and fewer than half of youth under the age of 19 manage to land summer jobs. That's largely because many low-skilled jobs have disappeared. The work that is left is in areas such as information technology that demand high skill levels.

Nearly 80,000 young people aged 15 to 24 are self-employed, including 15,000 who own their businesses.

The unemployment rate in that age group is more than 20%, but less than half that among university graduates. While 83% of post-secondary graduates report finding a job, less than half say it is in their field of study.

If higher education is the best route to better jobs, governments are making that tougher to achieve.

In the early 1990s, the federal government decided to cut about 20%, or $4 billion, from its transfers to the provinces for post-secondary education. The provinces passed these cuts on to students in thc form of higher fees and fewer grants (none in most provinces) and loans. The Ontario government, for example, announced in 1999 that it planned to cut $16.3 million from its student loan program. The government said it would save $6.3 million by denying loans to students with a bad credit history. Another $5 million would be saved by refusing loans to students who don't declare all their yearly income in their loan applications. A further $5 million was expected to come from penalizing universities and colleges where more than 28% of the students didn't pay back their loans.

Throughout the decade of the '90s, student debt nearly tripled and Ottawa decided to remove itself further from the student loan arena: in 2000 it announced plans to pay the banks more than $100 million a year to continue administering the Canada Student Loan Program (CSLP). The program was actually handed over to the banks in 1995. Banks are in the business of making money, so they kept asking for more public dollars to ensure they made a profit from their student loan business. Michael Conlon, national chairman of the Canadian Federation of Students, didn't like this idea. In an article in the Globe and Mail, he wrote: "Simply put, turning the program over to the banks strips it of public accountability and adds the cost of providing a profit to the banks."

The money is designed to compensate the banks for losses incurred when a loan is unpaid. However, according to Mr. Conlon, 92% of student loans are paid back in full. So, who's ahead here? Clearly, not the students. Mr. Conlon provides some interesting figures for the period 1990 to 1998:

* the average tuition fees for an arts program increased by 126% from $1,496 to $3,379;

* the average student debt upon graduation increased from $8,000 to $25,000; and,

* youth unemployment hovered around 20% during the 1990s.

The author concludes, "Canada's social and economic health is dependent on a strong system of post-secondary education.

"Paying the banks over $100 million a year to administer a social program is a very curious way to secure the future of anything - except, of course, the future prosperity of Canada's banks ..."

Despite the problems on the education front, it looks as though the job market, however depressed in the past decade, is about to explode. The good news is that Baby Boomers are starting to retire. According to the Conference Board of Canada, the current generation of high-school students will enjoy the hottest career prospects in decades. The Board predicts there'll be skill shortages everywhere, in both white- and blue-collar jobs. Opportunities will include careers as nurses, heavy equipment operators, millwrights, electricians, pipe fitters, welders, accountants, building trades, sales people, insurance underwriters, engineers, managers, and computer specialists.

And, some of the country's major corporations are pitching careers in the trades as well as the professions, visiting high schools as well as universities and colleges.

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES:

1. In a column in the Globe and Mail, took Salutin put forth the idea that ours "is a society that has little time for youth's own agenda." After strolling down Philosopher's Walk at the University of Toronto, he lamented: "You get little that's ... dreamy on campuses today. Everything tends the other way. Funding Jar the liberal arts is down,' technical training gets the money, as do colleges that produce the skills business says it needs." Mr. Salutin added that some who claim to believe in individualism, leave no room Jar it in schooling. Discuss these ideas and what kind of learning environment is likely to produce more creative thinkers, and whether or not this is desirable.

2. Read the late A.S. Neill's 1960 book Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing. Mr. Neill founded Summerhill, an independent school in England in 1921, believing that kids can decide what and when to learn. He wanted to "let children develop free from fear." Students choose whether to attend lessons and have equal weight with staff in deciding how the school should be run. The school was recently under attack when government inspectors reported that pupils were "allowed to mistake idleness for the exercise of personal liberty." The British government failed in its attempt to close the school.

Websites

Canadian Federation of Students - http://www.cfs-fcee. ca/index-e.shtml

Canada Student Loans Program - http://www.hrdcdrhc.gc.ca/student_loans/

Canadian Careers - http:// www.canadiancareers.com/ index.html

Young Canada Works - http:// www.pch.gc.ca/ycw-jct/ english/overview.htm

Youth Resource Network of Canada http://www.youth.gc.ca/

WORKING FOR PEANUTS 

About 5% of all employees work for minimum wage. That amounts to 545,000 workers, and, in the first quarter of 1998, young people between 15 and 24 accounted for a staggering 58% of them. That means 316,000 young workers were making the minimum wage or less. What makes minimum-wage workers different from the average is that they include more young people, more women, more students, more part-timers, and more people in restaurant and retail industries. They represented 18.4% of all young people who had jobs, almost four times the 4.8% figure for the whole work force. Of that 316,000, about 60% (191,000) were students who lived with their parents; 155,000 were between 15 and 19, the other 36,000 were 20 to 24. So, more than one-third of all minimum-wage workers were young students still living with their parents and working part-time.

FACT FILE

About 50% of Canadian students go directly to work from high school.