Yes, absolutely. The reason that I led this study mission was precisely because I think we Canadians, as big and as open as we are, sometimes become a bit insular. We sometimes think we've got the model. I think the truth is that when it comes to skills development, we are anything but a model. We have one of the highest levels of university academic enrolment in the world, which is great. A lot of young Canadians graduate with university degrees. Unfortunately, as we know, a growing percentage of them go on to be under-employed or employed in areas in which they did not study.
As I said, we also have one of the lowest levels of private sector investment in skills development in the developed world. We have 14% youth unemployment, which is unacceptable, and 14% unemployment among recent immigrants. We also have unacceptable levels of unemployment among our aboriginal people. All of this is in an economy where employers are saying that skills shortages are their primary challenge, so something is not working here.
That's why I invited key stakeholders, including my provincial counterparts, business organizations and labour unions to join me on a study mission in Germany and the United Kingdom. We had a delegation of 30 that included five provinces, most of the major business groups and some of the larger unions.
Germany is, I think, broadly considered as having the most remarkable model, not simply the country of Germany, but what they call the Germanic system, which is very similar as well as in Austria, Switzerland and Denmark, where there is very strong moral and practical encouragement for young people in the secondary school system to go into paid apprenticeship programs. Their conception of apprenticeships is much broader than ours. We have about 150 apprenticeable occupations. In Germany they have about 350. It includes things like retail and banking, as well as construction trades.
Over 60% of young Germans, roughly at the age of 16, go into these apprenticeship programs where typically they are at an employer location for about three and a half days a week and at a vocational college for one and a half days a week. The learning they're getting, the theory they're getting in the college, is perfectly integrated with the experience they're getting at the work site, and they're getting a modest stipend. These apprenticeship programs on average last three years, which means that most young Germans are graduating with a certificate at the age of 19 on average. They're already with an employer. Over 90% of them go on to be employed in the field for which they were trained, and they're unencumbered by debt.
One thing that is key is obviously the high degree of employer involvement in the education system and the sense of responsibility employers have to invest in training. That means maintaining all that equipment, paying for trainers, paying modest salaries to the apprentices. It's a big investment. In fact, in Germany employers collectively invest the equivalent of $47 billion Canadian a year on apprenticeship programs alone.
The other key factor is what they call the parity of esteem between technical training, such as through apprenticeships, and academic university degrees. Everyone in Germany, including the academics, told us that a trade certificate which an apprentice obtains at the age of 19 has the same social and economic value in the eyes of all Germans as a university degree does. Perhaps that's the biggest cultural change we need to see in Canada. For too long we have diminished the value of technical training, experiential learning, and non-academic education.
I don't mean for a moment to set one up against the other. To the contrary, I mean to say we should value and encourage all choices, because we have, I would argue, too many young Canadians pursuing academic programs which have very poor labour market prospects and we have emerging skills gaps in more technical vocations with future skills shortages.
I think at a high level those are the issues we need to address.
