Why Conestoga College matters

A half-century after the first students started classes at its south Kitchener campus, the college is bigger, better, with more locations, programs and students than ever.

Just as important, Conestoga is even more relevant to the Canadian economy and the people searching for a secure place in it than it was in 1967.

The latest results from the 2015 census, released earlier this month, show why Conestoga and colleges like it matter so much in the 21st century Canadian workplace — and why Conestoga deserves recognition on its 50th birthday.

While most Canadians saw their incomes steadily climb over the previous decade, the census numbers showed income gains in Ontario and Quebec were pitifully weak.

Entire regions of those provinces had become rust-belts after factories closed and workers lost the traditional manufacturing jobs that had provided generations of families with a good livelihood.

The manufacturing decline in Ontario was so serious that workers’ incomes typically fell. And locally, it meant that Waterloo Region dropped out of Canada’s Top 10 for household incomes.

This is the thundercloud hanging over young people leaving high school. This is why we should worry about economic inequality. Gone are the days when a high school diploma was the key that opened the door to a lucrative job for life in the nearest factory.

Now, those without marketable skills must often take temporary or part-time, minimum-wage work that could be replaced by a robot.

Yet these can also be the best of times if you’re schooled in specialized, high-demand skills.

And that’s where Conestoga and other community colleges fit in. They’re the pieces that help the employment puzzle make sense.

With 13,000 full-time students, Conestoga delivers more than 200 career-focused programs including Ontario’s only college-based, accredited engineering degrees.

Not only does it partner with universities for many programs, it serves as a finishing school for many university grads.

Its practical and precise job-oriented training perfectly complements the communications and problem-solving skills acquired in many university humanities programs.

Of course, it’s not just young people in the Conestoga classrooms. Older workers are there, too, getting new skills for new jobs.

And this is happening not only at Conestoga’s original campus in Doon, but at it campuses and training centres in Waterloo, Cambridge, Guelph, Stratford, Brantford and Ingersoll.

The high school grads who walk into Conestoga at any one of these places can anticipate walking out into a good job.

And you’ll meet the results everywhere you look in Waterloo Region and Wellington County where almost half the workforce — 193,026 people — have been educated in some way at Conestoga.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to these graduates who are essential to Waterloo Region and who are making it an internationally renowned centre of technology and innovation.

Just as much, we owe a debt of gratitude to their alma mater — Conestoga College — and its visionary president for the last 30 years, John Tibbits.