When choosing a post-secondary educational institution and program or an apprenticeship, it is critically important that you get as much information as you can including educational trends and opinions from current students or apprentices and alumni or journeypeople. This is doubly important for university students because of how costly university education is, both in terms of time and money, as well as the fact that university culture is commonly farther removed from the world of work than the polytechnic or apprenticeship educational models.
Our service strives to go beyond traditional educational/career planning, which typically focuses on exploring individuals’ interests and aptitudes, and allows you to get an idea for what is happening in the real world so that you can adjust your expectations and plan accordingly. After all, although your enthusiasm for, and talent in a particular field may be important components of success, there is no guarantee that there will be a place for you in the constantly shifting job market, especially in a country that ranks near the top of post-secondary educational attainment in the developed world. We are not chasing your tuition or licensing fees and strive to provide unbiased information you can use to make objective decisions.
Our ad-free subscription data service currently allows you to use interactive tables, charts, and maps to explore the demographic profiles, including population size and gender distribution, of graduating classes (completions) for programs at Canadian public post-secondary institutions between 2010/2011 and 2023/2024 and provincial apprenticeship programs between 2008 and 2024 for a modest annual fee.
You can explore the relative size of graduating classes between programs and find out if they have been expanding or contracting in recent years at the institutional (as applicable), provincial, or national level. This will help you to understand trends in the relative popularity of a given program both geographically and over time. Additionally, it will give you an idea of the competition you may be up against to either enter the workforce or to gain acceptance to a more advanced educational program, whichever the case may be.
While we were university students, we observed that after final year students graduate from a given program, they typically have little communication with the students who remain in more junior years. Consequently, the remaining students generally do not get to find out how the graduating students fared in the work force or graduate school, whichever the case may be.
Our forum is free for all to use and aims to provide a platform where students and prospective students alike can ask questions related to specific educational programs at specific institutions across Canada or specific provinces in the case of apprenticeships, and current students/alumni or apprentices/journeypeople can respond or simply post an unsolicited comment about the program/trade they are taking or have completed for the benefit of others.
Please be advised that there is no guarantee that someone will be able to answer your question, nor is there any way to confirm the validity of individual responses so they should be taken with a grain of salt. However, multiple responses corroborating each other should prove more useful than having no information at all and provide a starting point for further investigation. Please consult our Terms of Use page before using the forum.
To the extent that it occurs at all, educational/career planning in Canada focuses on the interests and aptitudes of the individual without consideration for supply and demand of graduates in the labour market. While interests and aptitudes are important considerations in educational/career decisions, they should be far from the only consideration.
As education is a provincial responsibility, educational statistics at the national level are hard to come by in Canada and even at the provincial or institutional level, availability of readily accessible statistics are highly inconsistent.
We have sourced the data you need to make inter-institution and inter-provincial graduate number comparisons, as well as determine trends over time.
Adding to the confusion of naïve and unsuspecting students, professional societies/associations/ regulators shamelessly promote their respective professions to the public regardless of market conditions, whether it is prudent or not.
Less than optimal educational/career decisions can have serious financial implications for individuals since average debt for Canadian university Bachelor’s graduates in 2020 was $30,600 (Stats Canada, Table: 37-10-0036-01) and collectively has detrimental societal and economic implications including under/unemployment, misallocation of resources, and decreased productivity.
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