Education Job Mismatch Among Canadian University Graduates

Concludes that inadequate skills utilization rather than skills shortages is the problem in Canada.

If you listen to the general chatter from parents, guidance counselors, and politicians, you would think that going to university is the only option that ensures future success. That's no longer true. This book is designed to help anyone under thirty make the best possible educational and career choices.

Secondary school graduates of the late 1980s and early 1990s have found themselves coping with economic insecurity, social change, and workplace restructuring. Drawing on studies that have recorded the lives of young people in two countries for over fifteen years, The Making of a Generation offers unique insight into the hopes, dreams, and trajectories of a generation. Although children born in the 1970s were more educated than ever before, as adults they entered new labour markets that were de-regulated and precarious. Lesley Andres and Johanna Wyn discuss the consequences of education and labour policies in Canada and Australia, emphasizing their long-term impacts on health, well-being, and family formation. They conclude that these young adults bore the brunt of policies designed to bring about rapid changes in the nature of work. Despite their modest hopes and aspirations for security, those born in the 1970s became a vanguard generation as they negotiated the significant social and economic transformations of the 1990s.

Social Differentiation examines the economic, political, and normatively defined relations that underlie the construction of social categories. Social differentiation, embedded in inequalities of power, status, wealth, and prestige, affects life chances of individuals as well as the allocation of resources and opportunities. Starting with a theoretical framework that challenges many traditional analyses, the contributors focus on four specific strands of social differentiation: gender, age, race/ethnicity, and locality. They explore the historically specific social practices, policies, and ideologies that produce distinct forms of inequality, in turn revealing and explaining such issues as the formation and maintenance of a gendered order; the privileging of prime-age workers; the penalties incurred by visible minorities in the labour market; the highly disadvantaged position of Aboriginals; and the economic decline of agriculture, resource, and fishing dependent regions. By paying special attention to political processes, norms, and representations, and by indicating how social policies shape economic functioning and relate to normative definitions, this book will interest policy-oriented researchers and decision-makers.

Youth, Education and Risk: Facing the Future provides a provocative and valuable insight into how the dramatic social and economic changes of the last twenty years have affected the lives of Western youth. Covering young people's attitudes towards relationships and health, the authors provide a comprehensive perspective on young people in Western society in the 1990s. The book reviews ten years of research, policy and practice as related to the 15-25 age group and compares data from the UK, Australia, the USA and Canada. It also argues for the need to develop new research and policy frameworks that are more in tune with the changed conditions of life for Western youth. The book sets out the conceptual basis for a new approach to youth and the practical implications for research, education and youth policy in the new millenium.

"Edited by one of the world's leading educational sociologists, based on national survey data and close-focus case studies, this book makes a powerful case for new policy, industrial, and educational thinking." - Raewyn Connell, University of Sydney