CMSF: Maintaining Canada’s Knowledge Advantage Demands Greater Post-Secondary Participation

MONTREAL, QUEBEC–(Feb. 21, 2007) – Canada’s population of young adults will fall by 300,000 in the next decade, meaning that unless policies change there will soon be too few college and university graduates to fill high-skilled jobs created by the knowledge economy or left vacant by retiring baby-boomers, says new research from the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation.

Published today, the report, entitled Why Access Matters, exposes the twin challenges of a changing economy and an aging population. To meet these challenges and maintain its knowledge advantage, Canada will need to graduate more students even as the youth population begins to decline. This means that participation in post-secondary education must be improved among youth from groups that are presently under-represented in our universities and colleges, particularly low-income youth, Aboriginal Peoples and those whose families have no history of higher education.The report’s key findings include:

– One-third of today’s young adults either do not enrol in post-secondary education or drop out before completion.

– In the Prairies, where the Aboriginal proportion of the population is relatively high, 72% of Aboriginal youth do not finish high school, do not access post-secondary education or drop out of post-secondary education by about age 20.

– Less than half of students from families whose income is below $25,000 participate in post-secondary education.

“The findings of this report pose a number of questions for policy-makers, particularly when it comes to encouraging equitable access to post-secondary education among under-represented youth,” said Norman Riddell, the Foundation’s executive director and chief executive officer. “We need to ask not only how we cultivate a greater interest in higher education, but also how many resources will be allocated to prepare these young Canadians for the academic, motivational and financial requirements of a post-secondary education – not to mention how will those resources be delivered?”

The Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation is a private, independent organization created by an act of Parliament in 1998. It encourages Canadian students to strive for excellence and pursue their post-secondary studies. The Foundation distributes $350 million in the form of bursaries and scholarships each year throughout Canada. Since its inception, it has awarded approximately 750,000 bursaries and scholarships, worth $2.2 billion, to Canadian post-secondary students.

Why Access Matters can be found on the Foundation’s Web site at www.millenniumscholarships.ca.

CONTACT INFORMATION

Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation
Jaime Frederick
Communications Advisor
514-284-7240
jfrederick@bm-ms.org