Hunting for a career today in Manitoba

This week, Assiniboine College will give away $51,000 in future scholarships. It’s part of our month-long campaign that will see us give away 65 $1,000 awards for future students as part of the institution’s 65th anniversary.

The ninth annual Easter Egg Hunt at our North Hill campus today will feature 12 such prizes. Another three will be awarded at a similar event in Dauphin.

The annual Easter Egg Hunt on at our North Hill campus was created because the bucolic grounds cry out for events like this. As an aside, when I first started at Assiniboine, the provincial government, which owned the property at the time, forbade many activities on the site (including people taking photos for things like weddings and graduations). This made little sense to me. I believed the campus should be more like a provincial park than a prison. Luckily with some ministerial intervention more than a decade ago, we were able to get support for this approach. Now that the college owns the property as of a year ago, those days are long behind us. I digress.

But we don’t give away the awards just because we are like the Easter Bunny simply wanting to spread joy to children on a long weekend. We do it because you cannot plant the seed too early in the minds of young people that they can see themselves going to college or university in the future.

In addition to the Easter Egg Hunts, we handed out these $1,000 awards recently at the Brandon Career Symposium, Assiniboine All-Access open house, at the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair and will award the final few at the upcoming Parkland Business Expo.

Today at the winter fair, the final six $1,000 awards for that event will be given out. That caps off 36 for the week. This includes six (one per day) for those aged six and under, those aged 7-9, those 10-12, 13-17, 17-20 and 21 and over.

There is evidence that giving young people resources increases their participation in post-secondary education. This is something Manitoba must do. Not that long ago, we had the lowest post-secondary participation rate in the country.

We have been making significant gains over the past decade. In fact, Statistics Canada released data last week that showed that for people aged 25 to 65, Manitoba now has a stronger post-secondary education attainment rate than Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Quebec. We’re tied with Alberta.

Not bad to have gone from last to middle of the pack. Look out, New Brunswick, we are coming for you!

Research shows that early savings and financial contributions have an effect on post-secondary attainment in Canada. So does career information and expectations. When young people grow up believing they’ll attend college and university and this becomes part of their identity, it helps.

Readers of a certain age might immediately smile and think of the episode of “The Office,” “Scott’s Tots,” where Michael Scott, manager of Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton, Pa., branch, famously promised a group of under-privileged third graders that if they graduated high school he’d pay all of their college tuition fees. As they reached high school, they had a better success rate than their peers and intended to go to college, only for Michael to confess he didn’t have the money.

These psychological effects are part of the public policy rationale for the creation of Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs). And while arguable, those in lower income brackets likely very rarely have the spare cash to take advantage of the favourable tax treatment for earnings on such plans, the government also created the Canada Learning Bond, specifically designed to support very young children of lower-income families to be registered in an RESP. While the amounts might be modest, Albert Einstein is attributed with having referred to compounding interest (gains) as the eighth wonder of the world.

But more importantly, saving for post-secondary builds the expectation for parents and their children that they’ll go to college or university.

This is also why events like the Brandon Career Symposium are so important. They help to give young people information on the wide variety of careers that might be available to them and the pathways they need to pursue if they want that career.

Research work through the Canadian Labour Economics Forum has also shown that career education can have an impact on earning beyond just post-secondary participation.

So, if you have kids under 12 and you find yourself in Brandon or Dauphin today, come on out and hunt for a future. Or, even if you are older than 12, come to the final day of the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair and drop by the Assiniboine-sponsored Royal Farmyard and enter for a chance at a $1,000 tuition award, no matter what your age. It’s never too late for a brighter future.