INTRODUCTION
1. That is, we’ll try to sound like we’re giving the advice you’d get from a friendly uncle who has your best interests at heart.
Chapter 1
1. See our article “The $1 Million Promise,” Maclean’s, January 21, 2013.
2. Zach Weiner, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, n.d., http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2729#comic.
3. The Conference Board of Canada reported that 88.4 percent of adult Canadians had completed high school as of 2010, which ranked the country second out of seventeen “peer countries.” The United States has a slightly higher rate. See Conference Board of Canada, How Canada Performs: High-School Completion, March 2013, http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/education/high-school-graduation-rate.aspx. Statistics Canada reported that 89.5 percent of Canadians between the ages of 20 and 24 were high school graduates in 2009–10 (Kathryn McMullen and Jason Gilmore, A Note on High School Graduation and School Attendance, by Age and Province, 2009/2010, November 3, 2010, http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/81-004-x/2010004/article/11360-eng.htm).
4. In the 1990s shares of Bre-X, a penny-stock mining company, soared on claims of a massive gold find in the Indonesian jungle. When these claims turned out to be fraudulent, the stock collapsed. A capsule summary of this notorious Canadian scam can be found at Sam Ro, “BRE-X: Inside the $6 Billion Gold Fraud that Shocked the Mining Industry,” Business Insider, July 1, 2012, http://www.businessinsider.com/bre-x-6-billion-gold-fraud-indonesia-2012-7.
Chapter 2
1. Council of Ontario Universities, Applications & Enrolment: Information about the Number of Students Who Attend Our Universities, February 23, 2013, http://www.cou.on.ca/applications-enrolment.
2. The figure for taxi drivers is from Mark Trumbull, “Have Degree, Driving Cab: Nearly Half of College Grads Are Overqualified,” Christian Science Monitor, January 28, 2013, http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2013/0128/Have-degree-driving-cab-Nearly-half-of-college-grads-are-overqualified. In 1970 it was 1 per cent.
3. On the subject of post-secondary education for firefighters in the United States, see Paul Fain, “Advanced Degrees for Fire Chiefs,” Inside Higher Ed, October 27, 2011, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/27/college-degrees-increasingly-help-firefighters-get-ahead.
4. The American National Retail Federation (http://www.nrf.com/modules.php?name=Pages&sp_id=1245) says that 49.5 per cent of retail workers “have college degrees, are currently in college, or have attended college.”
Chapter 3
1. You read 1984 in high school, right?
2. “10 Reasons to Do a Gap Year,” http://www.studentawards.com/stacks/articles/10-reasons-to-do-a-gap-year.aspx.
3. Statistics Canada, Table 2: Postsecondary Status of Young Adults Aged 24 to 26 by December 2005, by Province and Type of Institution Attended, November 17, 2008, http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/81-595-m/2008070/t/6000011-eng.htm, shows dropout rates by province. Quebec’s is the lowest, but that’s because dropouts there take place at the CEGEP stage, not at university.
Chapter 4
1. National Association of Career Colleges, Active Members, http://www.nacc.ca/w_active_members.aspx?#selectedSchoolBox2237.
2. Canadian Information Centre for International Credentials, Private Career and Vocational Colleges in Canada, http://www.cicic.ca/417/Private_Career_Colleges.canada.
Chapter 10
1. The chart is available at Ellis Chart: Comparative Chart of Apprentice Training Programs, http://www.ellischart.ca. It’s named for Frank Ellis, the director of apprenticeship in Saskatchewan who first developed it.
Chapter 11
1. See Ken S. Coates and Bill Morrison, Campus Confidential: 100 Startling Things You Don’t Know about Canada’s Universities (Toronto: Lorimer, 2011), chapter 7, “Your Grades Will Drop.”
2. “Canada Slipping in Math, Science and Reading Skills,” Postmedia News, December 7, 2010.
Chapter 12
1. McMaster University, Cost Estimator, http://future.mcmaster.ca/money-matters/cost-estimator.
2. Ontario University Athletics, http://oua.ca/sports/2011/7/15/Student%20Financial%20Awards.aspx.
3. Historical statistics on tuition fees and student debt levels are available online from Statistics Canada.
4. Shannon Doyne, “What Investment Are You Willing to Make to Get Your Dream Job?”, New York Times, The Learning Network, February 25, 2013, http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/what-investment-are-you-willing-to-make-to-get-your-dream-job/?partner=rss&emc=rss.
5. Jacob Serebrin, “More Students Balance School with Jobs,” Macleans.ca on Campus, January 25, 2012, http://oncampus.macleans.ca/educa
tion/2012/01/25/more-students-balancing-school-and-part-time-jobs/.
6. For some boozy nostalgia, see L. George and Barry Wells, “Sucking Back the Suds at the Ceeps Since 1890,” http://www.altlondon.org/article.php?story=20090901180023187.
7. Edmonton Sun, March 19, 2013. The policy has since been modified to permit the possibility of zeros.