You can get a job AND an education.

• Author: Cirtwill, Charles
• Position: Think Tank

I realize this may come as a shock to some, but it is possible for post-secondary institutions to provide students with what is known as a classical education AND to prepare them for employment. It is equally possible, indeed necessary, to develop critical thinking skills while also learning a trade.

For most of my adult life, I have been bombarded with the message that "college" is where people go to prepare for jobs, and "university" is where people go to enhance their knowledge or to improve society. Colleges tout their post-graduation employment numbers; universities not so much. Universities talk about their scholarship and award winners, their research prizes, and their product commercialization. Colleges not so much.

It turns out, however, that university graduates get jobs. In Ontario, their post-graduation employment numbers are consistently better than those of the colleges. According to the Council of Ontario Universities, employment rates of the 2013 graduating class, six months after graduation, was 87 per cent. Almost four in five university graduates had jobs. The comparable number for the Ontario college system was 83 per cent--not much of a gap, but a gap nonetheless--and not in favour of the organizations most of us would have expected. By the way, employment levels for university graduates two years after graduation? Ninety-four per cent.

Colleges and universities achieve these high rates of employment for exactly the same reason: they prepare their students to work in the areas they have chosen to study.

College performance measures released in 2017 show 87 per cent of their students reported that their program gave them the "knowledge and skills that will be useful" in their future career. Similar surveys of university graduates six month after graduation show an 83 per cent alignment, rising to 89 per cent two years after they have left university.

Four in five students, at both college and university, are graduating with specific skills and knowledge that they reportedly put to work in related occupations.

It also turns out that colleges offer reams of content related to the concepts of critical thinking and classical education. Even a cursory look at course offerings by Northern Ontario colleges demonstrate this...