Why More Highschoolers Should Consider College
Nichelle Googoo didn’t give attending college much thought before she graduated high school in Nova Scotia in 2016. She recalls attending open houses at her school hosted by St. Francis Xavier and Cape Breton universities, but doesn’t remember hearing anything about Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC), where she is currently enrolled in the licensed practical nursing diploma program. So Googoo went down the familiar path of many students: she applied to Cape Breton University for a bachelor of arts, spent a year there and left. “I hate sitting down and listening to a lecture,” she says.
Her first taste of college came shortly after, when she enrolled in a one-year baking and pastry arts certificate program at NSCC in 2019. After graduating, she worked in the kitchen at a local winery and as an overnight baker in a Halifax restaurant. A few years in, she realized that she craved more human interaction in her work. She decided to go back to college to pursue her childhood dream—nursing. Now 25, Googoo is one year into a two-year nursing diploma program at NSCC, where she’ll graduate as a licensed practical nurse, filling a critical need in Canada’s health system in an area such as acute care, long-term care, pediatrics or mental health care.
University is the default plan for many high school students charting their post-grad paths. College is often a backup if they don’t get the marks for university, or they lock into a career best kicked off at a community college—for example, carpentry, culinary arts or graphic design. In fact, enrolment in colleges has gone down in the under-24 cohort recently, with 489,957 students enrolled in the 2021–22 year (the last year there is data available for) compared to 506,340 four years prior. However, total enrolments in college during that time period went up, fuelled by growth in the 30 to 34 (14 per cent) and 35 to 39 (11 per cent) age groups. (All numbers include both domestic and international students.)
These figures reflect Googoo’s experience and what Pari Johnston, the president and CEO of Colleges and Institutes Canada (CICan), says is a common phenomenon: students head to university right after high school and then show up at a college when they realize the style of learning at university is not for them—or when they need concrete and specific skills to land the job they want. According to data from Statistics Canada, nearly one in five college students already has a bachelor’s degree or an even higher credential. For some students, however, college may be the best path from the start.
Community colleges as we know them started to take shape in Canada in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when governments were looking for a way to ensure a steady supply of skilled labour. Since then, colleges have grown in size and number (there are more than 130 community colleges and institutes across Canada), several have since become universities, like OCAD, or have paired up with universities to offer cross-institution degrees. Many have expanded their scope to include offerings such as applied research and international exchanges. Many are now also allowed to confer bachelor—and even master’s—degrees, in addition to the traditional certificates and diplomas colleges are known for. According to CICan, a membership organization that works on behalf of Canadian colleges, more than 95 per cent of Canadians live within 50 kilometres of a college campus, making colleges geographically accessible to almost everyone. (Private career colleges, of which there are more than 1,300 in Canada, offer flexible, short-term, job-focused training, often at a higher cost than public community colleges.)
A key differentiator between colleges and universities is that the programs offered at colleges align with specific needs in the labour market. If Canada needs more cybersecurity professionals, for example, colleges will develop cybersecurity programs, in consultation with industry, and put instructors who have real-world and often real-time experience in the field in front of those students.
Another draw: colleges teach hands-on skills, with many programs interspersing classroom work with time in workshops, labs and training facilities. Students in the early childhood education program at Humber College in Toronto, for example, spend time in a licensed childcare centre on campus, in a simulation lab where students can practice the techniques they’re learning on each other and in outdoor classrooms. The aerospace campus at British Columbia Institute of Technology, in Richmond, measures 285,000 square feet and includes a hangar with several planes and helicopters, hands-on classrooms where students work with hydraulics and engines and a flight simulator.
Many programs also break up class time with field placements or “work-integrated learning”—mandatory time working in places such as hospitals, child-care centres, construction sites, not-for-profits and long-term care homes. This practice is becoming more common at universities, but is part of the raison d’etre of a college.
With all the focus on hands-on skills and job readiness, it’s no surprise that colleges deliver on their promise to help students land jobs. According to a graduate survey from Assiniboine Community College in Brandon, Manitoba, 88 per cent of graduates are employed in their field of study nine months after graduation. The numbers are similar at colleges across the country.
So, why aren’t high school students flocking to them? Johnston of CICan says colleges are battling a cultural stigma that places them beneath universities for cachet, opportunity and income potential. “We have had a historic bias of channeling students who do well academically into universities, even though they actually want to do more hands-on, applied work,” she says.
She says colleges, and her organization, need to do a better job of selling the value proposition of college to high schoolers—both so that students who would thrive in college end up there, and for the benefit of the country as a whole. “Some of our biggest challenges, whether it’s housing, health care, dental care or long-term care, require college graduates,” she says.
Rebecca Burwell, a private career counsellor based in Guelph, Ontario, says that between her undergraduate degree, master’s and college diploma, it was the latter that gave her the leg up she needed to launch her career. Why? Because that’s where she actually learned to perform the tasks, like career assessments, that she needed in her job as a career and work counsellor.
Burwell, who has worked in the post-
secondary education sector at both colleges and universities for several years, now gets hired by parents to work with their teens to make post-grad plans. She finds the snobbery directed at college-centric pathways frustrating. For her, a student’s choice of higher ed institution should boil down to their career end-game. If they want to become a lawyer, then university is the way to go. But if the person wants to be an event planner, a college diploma that teaches specific skills and has work placements within the industry is a wise choice. The key, though, is spending the time to figure that out, rather than just accepting a spot at a university and hoping things will work out.
It would be helpful for students if high school guidance counsellors and parents were more aware of the many benefits of colleges and how they may be a good choice for many students. And while this does include kids who don’t excel academically—colleges arguably do a better job at accommodating students with diverse learning needs than universities—it’s not exclusive to this group.
College can also be a good way for people to get their feet wet in a career, with hands-on training and practicums available right off the bat, to give them a sense of whether they enjoy the work. Many programs even allow students to bridge into university degree programs after completion—these students end up with a skills-based college diploma and an undergraduate degree, often in just four years. Students who complete the social service worker program at Humber College in Toronto, for example, can then enter into the third year of a bachelor of child and youth care, a bachelor of applied science in community social services or a bachelor of social science in addictions and mental health.
Bridging to a degree program is exactly what Googoo plans to do. She’s enjoying nursing so much that, once she finishes her program at NSCC and clocks 1,800 hours of work experience, she plans to apply to a registered nursing program at a university. By that point, she’ll have plenty of experience in the field and will bring a level of understanding and real-world context to her studies. It’s taken her a while, but she’s finally found what she was meant to do. “I’m a big people-person,” she says. “So I try to be my most cheery self when I’m working. If I was having a bad day, I would like somebody to do that for me, too.”
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