Canadians are uncharacteristically frustrated these days. They don’t feel good about the direction of the country or its future.
These sentiments are widely shared across age, backgrounds, and regions. Yet they seem most acute among a particular cohort—a group that we’ve come to think of as Canada’s over-credentialed working class. These are the people who “did what they were supposed to do,” but still seemingly “can’t get ahead.”
New research by the Cardus think tank seeks to better understand these Canadians and the unfulfilled promise of modern credentialization.
To be clear, the working class refers to those Canadians who work in jobs that do not require a post-secondary degree, diploma, or certificate. This has changed significantly since the 1950s and 1960s. It is no longer your grandpa’s working class, which was mostly men in unionized jobs at a factory or a mill. Today, working-class Canadians are at least as likely to be women or recent immigrants working as cashiers, delivery drivers, or doing other service-industry work.
The frustrating bit for them is that they are over-qualified for their jobs.
Fifty-six percent of working-class Canadians have a college diploma or a university degree, despite not needing those credentials for the jobs they hold. Almost 20 percent of them have a university degree specifically. This suggests that the stereotype of a university graduate serving coffee full-time is a real thing. And it’s not just a young-person phenomenon. Our research shows that a majority of the working class holds a post-secondary credential in all age groups under 60.
The problem is getting worse. The proportion of these overeducated underachievers with an unused post-secondary education has risen from 42 percent in 2006 to 56 percent now. The proportion with a university degree specifically has more than doubled, rising from 9 percent to 19 percent over the same period. This over-qualification (or over-credentialization) is key to understanding the frustration of Canada’s working class.
Canada’s political leaders can address that frustration in two main ways.
First, they need to fix Canada’s foreign credentials recognition processes. Many in the over-credentialed working class are recent immigrants, whose professional credentials we don’t accept. In fact, about three-quarters of recent working-class immigrants have credentials they’re not using in their jobs—and 44 percent even have a university degree. Foreign-credential recognition is a longstanding issue, but Canadian leaders need to take it seriously so that our economy doesn’t miss out on their potential, but also so that newcomers may be more fulfilled in Canada.
Second, our education system requires a restructuring. For decades, young people have been told that a post-secondary education was their key to a successful future, but our research suggests that it’s not panning out for many of them.
The average working-class wage is about $24 per hour, regardless of whether a worker has a post-secondary credential or not. That’s less than half the average wage of someone whose job actually does require a university degree. In other words, the over-credentialed working class isn’t getting a wage premium for its educational experience.
There are many reasons to attend college or university, including self-fulfillment and a love of learning, but it’s not hard to understand why the over-credentialed members of the working class might feel unfulfilled and frustrated. They almost certainly went to college or university with the idea that their education would give them access to a different class of jobs. All work has dignity and offers the possibility of fulfillment, but that doesn’t change the fact that these workers hoped for something that they’re not receiving.
Some of this can be blamed on “credential inflation”—the idea that you need higher and higher education for jobs that used to require less. What used to require a diploma now requires a degree; where you used to need a bachelor’s, you now need a master’s. People respond by getting more and more education, but this in turn devalues those very credentials. When students graduate and join the labour market, many find that their degrees aren’t worth as much as they were told.
Peter Turchin compares this to a reverse game of musical chairs: more and more graduates competing for a limited number of professional-class jobs. Except that in real life, the game turns into anxiety, resentment, and frustration.
It’s time to rethink the connection between our education system and the economy. With more than half of the working class today holding credentials that they don’t need for their jobs, we need to fix this mismatch before the music stops.
