Statistics Canada reported Monday that the gap in wages between Canadians with a high-school diploma and those holding a college or university degree is shrinking. According to the CBC, “high school grads are making wage gains, while the earnings of holders of a post-secondary school degree are staying flat — and in the case of young men, even decreasing”. The CBC quotes MLI senior fellow Ken Coates as saying that we “overemphasize the so-called knowledge economy, but the reality is we have not yet produced very many of those jobs and what we have is a natural resource economy that’s propping up the rest, and a service industry tagging along behind it”.
The CBC reports: “Coates said the real lesson to be gleaned from the numbers is not that the fate of those with just a high school diploma is getting better, but rather that the fate of those who blindly pursue more schooling is stagnating. ‘If you follow the swarm you’re just going to walk over the cliff,’ Coates said. ‘When we keep focusing on what the economy looked like in 1980, we are doing a very poor service to young people coming out of high school.'”
