Canadian Millennials Struggle As College Degrees Don't Guarantee Jobs (www.cbc.ca)

"CBC News is reporting on how millennials are finding that education only guarantees debt, not a stable job. Not even in STEM," writes Slashdot reader BarbaraHudson, adding "The irony -- one of the teachers touting the values of further education is herself part of the gig economy." An anonymous reader summarizes the article, which reports that 33% of the engineers in Ontario are now underemployed. "I actually thought that coming out of school I would be a commodity and someone would want me," said one 21-year-old mechanical engineering graduate. "But instead, I got hit with a wall of being not wanted whatsoever in the industry." He's applied for 250 engineering jobs, resulting in four interviews, but no job offer, and he's since broadened his job search to the deli counter at the local grocery store, because "It's a job."

"More than 12% of Canadians between the ages of 15 and 24 are unemployed," reports CBC News, "and more than a quarter are underemployed, meaning they have degrees but end up in jobs that don't require them. The latest numbers from Statistics Canada show that the unemployment rate for 15-to-24-year-olds is almost twice that of the general population... A 2014 Canadian Teachers' Federation report found nearly a quarter of Canada's youth are either unemployed, working less than they want or have given up looking for work entirely."
The article also points out that the number of students enrolled in Canadian universities has more than doubled since 1980, from 800,000 to over two million.

Comments

Life is sometimes a bit difficult.

[TiggertheMad]

I hear this year after year about how college grads have a hard time finding jobs. When I got out of college, I was already well into my second decade of coding experience, and nobody wanted to hire me because nobody wants to hire a n00b with no professional experience. But I stuck to it and I took a few lousy jobs to build up my resume and get some experience. Years later, I make good money now as a dev, and I have no shortage of job offers. I feel like each generation goes through this, was there ever a group of kids that got instantly hired up fresh out of college without any effort?

There should be a final class that is mandatory before you graduate were they tell people that life isn't going to be handed to you on a silver platter, and that some degree of struggle is par for the course.

That being said, the next decade or so should really open things up in the job market as all the baby boomers really start dying in droves.