On the skills gap, over the last number of years I've planned seven skills summits where there was a lot of finger-pointing about who should be doing what. What I'm really pleased about is that we do have some better labour market information and we have much more labour market information. There is strong consensus amongst colleges, polytechnics, universities, and the business sector that we need to continue to invest in labour market information to take advantage of big data to help us better project what the needs are and what the supply will be.
I want to commend to the committee work by Ross Skinny at the University of Ottawa who has done a study of every graduate from 14 institutions tied to their income tax files. What it shows is that post-secondary graduates do very well. I'll just highlight that.
I also want to come back to your point about continued investments in labour market information. Continued federal-provincial cooperation on that will be important.
On the aboriginal case, this is one we have to do better on as a country. The indigenous youth population is growing at three times the national rate, while university retainment is one third the national rate. There are a number of systemic barriers to that, but you might be shocked to know that the federal government supports fewer aboriginal students going to post-secondary today than it did 15 years ago. That's because the pot has remained closed and the number of students who have completed high school has increased. We are leaving thousands of indigenous students who have completed high school without the means to get into post-secondary of any kind.
We do try to increase direct financial assistance. There are a number of mechanisms that could be approached. There is the existing program. There's also the phenomenal work of Roberta Jamieson and Indspire, which has not only received federal funding but has also received significant private sector funding as well.