Thank you for that question.
From our perspective it's incredibly important that we have a system of post-secondary education that is encouraging young people who are interested and passionate about any number of different areas and professions that could be of importance in our society and that they be given equal opportunity to access those.
When we talk about the dangers of particularly focusing on STEM or individual career paths, what we do see are a lot of young people who, even over the past 25 years in my generation, in many ways have been misled into thinking there would be a guaranteed job for them in a particular sector. For example, students were encouraged to go into teaching in Ontario, and then they saw a lack of teaching opportunities after there was a surplus of students who were graduating from the Ontario teachers colleges, or young people decided to focus on developing a career within the resource extraction industry and today aren't finding jobs in those fields.
We believe that the key to actually building a sustainable economic system across our country that actually encourages young people to be trained in a variety of different professions is going to ensure that we have people who are graduating not only in those STEM fields, but people who are also graduating in fields we know we need in our society today but may not necessarily be the ones where all of the public funds for support may be today.
Having the opportunity for anyone to be able to think about expanding their horizons in what they're passionate about will help us ensure that we have young people who are graduating from a variety of sectors and provide us with a diversity that we need in our society. In the same way we need people who are graduating from those STEM fields, we also need people who are graduating in architecture, who are graduating in a number of different fields. I think it's a bit short-sighted to pigeonhole young people and their futures into one particular job sector if those jobs disappear in the next 20 to 25 years.