Detouring from the university route
Some might see David Cook as the quintessential millennial dreamer. He would probably disagree. At 21, and three years out of high school, Cook wants to find purpose beyond the walls of a university.
He recently left his job stocking grocery-store shelves — a job he says was terrible.
Yet he refuses to entertain the notion of going back to school just for the sake of “getting an education.”
“I saw a lot of my friends taking programs in college that they thought would be easy or shortterm,” he says. “I saw them taking things they had no genuine passion for doing and taking programs to take their parents off their back or to give them something to do for the next few years.
“They didn’t have any rounded, realistic idea of what they wanted to do, or who they were, or what they wanted to do with their life, or what was important — so they were kind of floating,” he says.
Cook says that what he’s rejecting isn’t education but the onesize-fits-all model of learning that churns out bachelor-of-arts grad after bachelor-of-arts grad.
“Going through high school, I was well aware that there was this industrial repetition, and I did not fit that model,” he says.
He says he doesn’t think going to university holds the same guaranteed path to success that it did for his parents’ generation.
But, David Foot, a retired economics professor from the University of Toronto who specializes in demographics, says those who think a university education won’t get them anywhere anymore are wrong.
Foot says that “accreditation escalation” is still alive and well, meaning Cook will likely need more education than his parents, not less.
For millennials, a bachelor’s degree is the new the high school degree. With it, a person’s likelihood of finding employment increases substantially. Without it, it’s tough going.
Only 58.3 per cent of high school graduates land a job without any additional qualifications, while nearly three-quarters of all university graduates find work after completing their degree, Statistics Canada reports.
As the imperative to have a bachelor’s degree increases, so, too, does the number of students who are attending Canadian universities.
In 2013 -14, there were 2,048,019 students enrolled in Canada — up by 7.5 per cent from 2009-10.
And while enrolment rates in Ontario universities decreased by 2.9 per cent in 2014 — the first time in 15 years, the Ontario Council of Universities says — Ontario universities actually saw a 2.1 per cent increase in new undergraduate enrolment in 2015.
“It’s well known that the population of university-aged youth in Ontario is expected to decline until about 2021,” says Wendy McCann, a spokeswoman for the Council of Ontario Universities. “However, increased interest in attending university might mitigate this effect.”
Cook says he hasn’t outright rejected the idea of doing any type of post-secondary education. He’s going to wait until he’s found something that he’s passionate about.
“I like to be creative, and I hate the limitations of boxes,” he says.
“So the system as, it stands, is not something I felt very comfortable in ... and I opted not to go into and go into debt for it, because why on earth would I put my debt (toward) something that I would hate?”