Canadian 2-year colleges show path to jobs

Toronto — At the University of Manitoba, Angela Conrad felt it was taking forever to satisfy degree requirements with courses in women’s studies, Greek mythology and other subjects she considered impractical.

All she really wanted was a job in marketing.

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“It takes people two years, sometimes three years, to finish” Manitoba’s mandatory general-studies track, Conrad said. “It made me think there had to be a learning style that was faster and more practical than that.”

Conrad, 23, found one at Toronto’s George Brown College, the Canadian equivalent of an American community college, where she transferred after giving up on a four-year university degree in favor of a two-year diploma.

“This is better,” Conrad recounted in the student lounge of the bustling downtown campus one recent day. “The teachers really do hands-on kinds of things.” Conrad also has a job while she studies, organizing events for the Hudson’s Bay Co. department-store chain.

Hugely popular for emphasizing practical skills that lead directly to careers, community colleges — most of which simply call themselves colleges, as opposed to universities — get much of the credit for making Canada second in the world in the percentage of young people ages 25 to 34 who hold some sort of postsecondary degree, according to a 2011 report from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. More than half of all Canadians have such degrees, and half of those went to community college.

That’s an upside-down version of the American system, in which community colleges — while enrolling nearly half of all undergraduates — are a drag on the nation’s higher-education standing. The OECD puts the United States at 16th in the world in the percentage of young people with a postsecondary qualification. South Korea ranks first.

Only one in 10 Americans has finished a community college, compared with more than one in four Canadians. One reason is that students enter U.S. community colleges considerably less prepared. Forty-two percent arrive needing at least one remedial course in math or English, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Most attend part time, and barely 20 percent finish two-year degrees within three years.

By contrast, Canadian community colleges increasingly attract students who, like Conrad, have given up on universities and transferred, or who already have university degrees. So prevalent has this become that one community college in northwest Toronto, Humber College, now has more graduate business students than any Canadian university. And two-year colleges have become far more nimble than universities, starting new programs in quick reaction to employer demand.

Scott McAlpine, president of Douglas College in suburban Vancouver, said: “Colleges in Canada are not an inferior good.”

As George Brown student Randy Orenstein put it: While universities teach you how to think, “colleges teach you how to do. There is less philosophical navel-gazing. It does seem to be very much that universities are about the abstract and colleges about practical skills.”