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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