Early labour market outcomes of Canadian university graduates by discipline:
A longitudinal cross-cohort analysis
by Ross Finnie (Department of Economics, Queen's University)
Business and Labour Market Analysis Division
Analytical
Studies Branch research paper series, No. 164
It is generally understood
that early career—as well as longer-term—outcomes of university graduates
vary significantly by field of study, but there is not a great deal of empirical
evidence on the subject for Canada. This paper attempts to help fill this gap
by reporting the results of an empirical analysis of the early career outcomes
of recent Canadian Bachelor's level graduates by discipline based on three
waves of the National Graduates Surveys, representing those who completed their
degrees in 1982, 1986, and 1990, with information gathered during interviews conducted
two and five years after graduation for each group of graduates (1984/87, 1988/92,
1990/95).
Many of the findings are very much in the expected direction:
males dominate engineering and some of the sciences while women are more common
in the "softer" disciplines, earnings patterns are more-or-less as anticipated,
and so on, but it is obviously useful to be able to confirm these expectations
and to quantify the observed differences. Some of the other results are, however,
perhaps more surprising. For example, satisfaction with the choice of education
programme was at least as great among graduates of the fine arts and humanities
disciplines as in education and mathematics and physical sciences, and consistently
higher than for those completing their degrees in economics, the other social
sciences, and agricultural and biological sciences. This result is consistent
with other research demonstrating that earnings for science graduates were no
better, and often poorer, than for many other graduates.
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