Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to the committee.
As the founder of Let's Talk Science, I've spent the last 20-plus years trying to help ensure that Canadian youth are ready for and prepared to thrive in a very different kind of work environment. I think my take-home message would be that I really urge the committee to think about the entire chain of how we get young people even thinking about employment. What is the age at which we begin to even think about this?
Let's Talk Science is a national charitable organization that engages youth across the full developmental continuum. We start in preschool. We work all the way through to post-secondary and graduate studies. We help young people develop the critical skills, competencies, and attitudes that are increasingly needed in a knowledge-based economy, and we do that by engaging them in meaningful science, technology, engineering, and mathematics programs or STEM, and I'll talk about STEM.
Every year we work with 40 universities and colleges—we have a waiting list of others that want to get involved—and we engage over 3,000 young volunteers in reaching out. The average age of our volunteers is early twenties. We work with thousands of educators to ensure that they have the support so that the young people in their classrooms know how to start thinking and finding information about employment.
I have to say we do benefit greatly from the ESDC employment programs for summer youth employment. Those I do urge you to keep. They really help charities to operate.
I'm here to touch on a couple of points about youth employment. I do want to just underscore the fact that we need to do a better job of helping youth understand and develop the evolving skills that are needed for employment, and we need to start a lot earlier.
My first point is that STEM really does underpin 21st century employment opportunities. Over the past few years, Let's Talk Science has produced a few different reports that look at current and projected employment opportunities and matched them up to their connections in the STEM fields. We found that a vast majority of them are requiring STEM skills and knowledge regardless of the post-secondary pathway. I really do want to underscore what the first two panellists spoke about—the needs for university, college, and trades. We found that STEM feeds very much into all three of the pathways.
Our estimates are that well over 70% are needing or benefiting from STEM skills, and those are the jobs that we know about. We need STEM skills for engineers, engineering technicians, health care workers, farmers, and heavy equipment operators. I could go on. We have to stop thinking that math and science are only for research laboratories. They really are important for Canada's jobs.
Despite this growing need for STEM talent, fewer that half of our kids are leaving high school with the courses they need to pursue. In fact, fewer than 20% of our high school kids graduate with physics now. At a recent meeting I had at one of the colleges in the eastern board, the faculty there said that advanced physics and calculus were needed for their automotive program. So by the time kids are leaving high school, 80% of the cohort is disappearing.
STEM engagement prepares people for high-demand occupations, which is what we typically think about, but it prepares people for the lower-skilled jobs that don't look like they did a generation ago because of technological advances. Most young people don't even realize how many doors they're closing when they drop their programs. So we really need to do a better job of promoting the importance of STEM for all jobs in Canada, for all employment opportunities. Too many kids are leaving. They don't have career information. They don't see the connections. They're not seeing that they are relevant for their future opportunities.
While we're touching on jurisdictional issues here, I have some ideas that we can talk about in the question period.
The second point is about the importance of supporting volunteer opportunities to build employability skills. We really rely on the volunteerism of thousands of graduate students, undergraduate students, and college students across the country. They're all over the country doing hands-on programming for free. We have about 100 student coordinators in place who are currently doing their master's or their Ph.D.s while they're actually doing this as volunteers on their campuses. By doing this—