If you look at education as an investment in your future, here are programs that can provide rewarding returns.
When it comes to postsecondary education, students often want to know the return on investment. And there’s no shortage of economic data that can boil this down to dollars and cents.
In 2017, for example, Statistics Canada reported that men with an apprenticeship certificate in the skilled trades had median earnings of $72,955 in 2015. That was 31 percent higher than the average earnings of a high-school graduate but 11 percent less than those of men with a bachelor’s degree.
For women, there was a big payoff in obtaining a bachelor’s degree, according to the same report. Those who did earned a median of $68,342, 40 percent more than those with a college diploma and 60 percent more than those with a high-school diploma.
“Completing an apprenticeship did not result in higher earnings for women as it did for men,” Statistics Canada reported. “In fact, women with an apprenticeship certificate earned 12% less than women with high school as their highest educational qualification.”
Among B.C. residents between 15 and 64, those with a bachelor’s degree had a median income of $62,985 in 2015, compared to $48,353 for those with a college diploma, $43,327 for those with an apprenticeship certificate, and $45,563 for those with a high-school diploma.
But postsecondary education is about more than the salary one receives after graduating. It can forge lifelong friendships, produce more informed citizens, and even offer an opportunity to meet a spouse.
From a labour-market perspective, degrees increase income over the course of a person’s life, according to the Conference Board of Canada, as well as providing societal benefits.
“The total return (net present value), both private and public, for a Canadian man who completes tertiary education is $220,365 ($153,520 in benefits to the individual and $66,845 to society),” the Conference Board of Canada states on its website. “And for a Canadian woman, the total return is $158,036 ($111,487 to the individual and $46,539 to society).
“These significant positive returns—both for individuals and the country—demonstrate the value that Canadians and the Canadian economy place on educational achievement.”
In 2011, UBC economist W. Craig Riddell and York University economist Xueda Song published a paper in a journal called Labour Economics looking at the relationship between education levels and bouncing back from being unemployed.
They examined data for Americans 12 months after losing a job and for Canadians six months after becoming unemployed. It marked the first time that a “causal effect”, rather than a mere correlation, could be demonstrated between education level and the amount of time that someone was out of work.
“Results indicate that education significantly increases reemployment rates of the unemployed,” Riddell and Song wrote in a discussion paper for the Institute for the Study of Labor. “Particularly large impacts are found in the neighbourhoods of 12 and 16 years of schooling.”
In this week’s Georgia Straight, we’re highlighting 10 educational initiatives in Metro Vancouver and other parts of the country.
It’s not all about the money, of course. It’s imperative that prospective students search out programs that are a good fit for their personality and that will help them reach their potential as human beings.
But it’s also worth noting the message from the research cited above: investing in education can pay handsome dividends.
ADLER UNIVERSITY FOCUSES ON RESEARCH SKILLS
➧ ADLER UNIVERSITY professor Shawn Ireland readily acknowledges that there are some misconceptions about his chosen field of industrial and organizational psychology.
“Somehow, when you say the words psychology or psychologist, people automatically think you’re a shrink or you’re going to come in and do psychoanalysis,” the Vancouver campus program director of the organizational-psychology program told the Straight by phone. “While we may be trained as clinicians, we’re not doing clinical work in organizations. That’s an important distinction.”
Ireland said that this discipline involves examining the interaction of systems and structures to help manage and enhance the performance and well-being of those within an organization.
“If there’s passion about the mission, people will work for you and commit to doing the work at a much higher and more committed level than they would if it’s just a job and they’re getting a paycheque,” Ireland noted.
Adler University offers a master of arts and a master’s in industrial and organizational psychology.
“The difference is the master of arts
has a research thesis and the master’s in organizational psychology has a capstone project,” Ireland said.
Each is a full-time program lasting two years.
Organizational psychology has traditionally focused on the work environment, health and wellness of employees, and the culture of a company, nonprofit, or government body, according to Ireland. He added that the industrial side is rooted in research, evidence, and assessment.
Industrial and organizational psychologists are sometimes retained when there are company mergers or corporate acquisitions.
“For instance, after the bankers leave, we try to put these organizations together,” Ireland said. “I, as a psychologist, will be part of the team that helps manage that transition. For nonprofits or government agencies, we will be part of the assessment piece to provide data to those in positions of authority to make decisions.”
There are three dimensions to Adler University’s master of arts and master’s in industrial and organizational psychology programs. The first is course work, including a strong emphasis on research and statistics, strategic human-resources management, training and development, organizational assessment, leadership, and coaching.
Ireland called the research component “absolutely critical”. That’s because an industrial and organizational psychologist’s recommendations are rooted in the quality of research methodologies.
The courses are augmented by experiential work in the community.
Adler University requires every student in the two programs to go on a practicum advancing social justice. The school has 150 organizational partners across Metro Vancouver and students have contributed about 150,000 hours of community service.
“We’re leaders in that area,” Ireland said. “That happens in the very first term of the program. They go right into it.”
In their final term, students must complete a second practicum, this time focusing on organizational psychology. This must be done within a commercial, nonprofit, or governmental organization, offering students an opportunity to apply skills that they learned during their program.
“I would say half our students come in already working in government, nonprofits, or the commercial sector,” Ireland said. “So they come in to enhance their credentials and enhance their experience—ideally, from what we see happening, to help their professional advancement or career advancement.”
Some students enroll who don’t have a lot of work experience but have the necessary undergraduate degree to gain admittance. Ireland said that after they graduate, they often work in small to medium-size enterprises, though some find jobs in the nonprofit or governmental sector.
Adler University requires a 3.0 grade-point average, though it’s fairly flexible when it comes to people who have been in the workforce for many years and might be in senior human-resources positions.
“We have some basic criteria and then we work from there,” Ireland explained, “basically because experience trumps academic quality of work if there’s a long period of time in between.”
Adler University tends to cap each cohort at 20 students. They can begin their program in September, January, or May.
In recent years, there has been a growing number of international students, which pleases Ireland. That’s because this stimulates more cross-cultural learning.
“Students are coming in from a wide variety of backgrounds,” he said. “The conversations are much more robust and are challenging the core assumptions that our Canadian students are holding about how the world works and about what are the priorities and what’s important.”
Another exciting development, from his perspective, is the role of neuroscience in helping psychologists better understand the structure and functioning of the brain. Ireland pointed out that this is opening up avenues of inquiry around how people make decisions, process information, and respond to various types of environments.
“We’ll always go back to some of the latest research and scientific breakthroughs as a way of helping a client understand the recommendations we make—or when we facilitate the client coming up with recommendations,” he said. “We add that to the mix for them to consider in their decision-making process.”
LANGARA SETS STANDARD FOR STUDENT VOLUNTEERS
➧ VOLUNTEERING HAS BEEN a lifelong passion for Reba Noel. As a Memorial University student in Newfoundland, she and her friends spent their Halloweens bringing treats to kids in hospital. She’s on the board of a community-support agency, volunteers with her church, and spent lots of time helping out when her son was involved in sports.
“Volunteering and giving back is a really big part of my life,” Noel told the Straight by phone. “I think that was instilled in me at a very early age watching the things that my mom did.”
Now the manager for student engagement at Langara College, Noel was among 49 Langarans honoured at a recent ceremony for their impact on the school and the community during the school’s 49-year history. She was hired in 1995 as an assistant in the counselling department. In 2014, she became responsible for Langara’s VOLT volunteer program, which was founded by two students four years earlier.
“It provides opportunities for students to volunteer both on campus and off campus,” Noel explained.
Noel pointed out that VOLT is not an acronym but a “unit of potential”.
“All of our students are a unit of potential,” she declared. “So, everybody has the potential to give back.”
Students register for the VOLT program and the school keeps track of the amount of time they each spend volunteering. When they reach 50, 100, and 200 hours, they are honoured with a celebration. Recent statistics showed that the students have donated 14,200 hours so far in 2019.
The goal for some is to be designated a “volunteer ambassador”.
“That is presented to you based on the type of hours, how many hours you give back, and in what capacity,” Noel said. “Students are also awarded a certificate, and they’re able to apply for some financial rewards that are available just for volunteers.”
She noted that students in the VOLT program receive a “coveted VOLT T-shirt”, which they only wear while volunteering. Even the employees of Langara don’t receive this.
Participants can also receive letters of reference from Noel’s office as well as from the organizations that they’ve assisted.
“I think the VOLT program is an incredible complement to the Langara culture, having been here for so many years,” Noel said. “Langara really is about community.”
She credited the VOLT volunteer program coordinator, Maggie Stewart, for helping turn it into one of the college’s signature initiatives. The website lists places where students can donate their time and energy while gaining valuable experience and forging connections in the community.
It can be at a Langara immunization clinic or with a long list of outside agencies, including the Richmond Music Festival, Latincouver Cultural and Business Society, B.C. Achievement Foundation, Vancouver Coastal Health, and Canadian Red Cross. And Stewart provides the students with extensive training, according to Noel.
“Students build relationships with other students whom they might not otherwise have come in contact with,” Noel said. “And they find out that at the base of it, there are similarities and they do have things in common. So they start to build a community that way.”
To ensure that the school is a good neighbour, some students in the VOLT program pick up trash within a two-block area around the main campus on West 49th Avenue. Or they’ll remove invasive plant species from the grounds.
The office of community engagement also provides three low-risk and low-barrier group volunteering opportunities per term through a program called C Change, which is short for “community change”.
These initiatives are aimed at improving neighbourhoods either socially, environmentally, or economically. As an example, a school bus took students from the college to Iona Beach Regional Park in September to