Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and distinguished committee members, for giving me the opportunity to speak today about my research and how it relates to the issue of youth transitions and the role of extracurricular experiences or experiential learning experiences in this transition.
Today is about volunteering. I'm not an expert on volunteering, but some of my research has links to it. Volunteering is an important part of our lives in Canada; I think we can all agree on that. It brings individuals and communities together.
Today in my seven minutes I also want to highlight a few problems that arise when we instrumentalize volunteering as a central aspect of how young people transition from education to employment.
As undergraduate degrees have become more common, employers, and also admission committees to graduate and post-graduate programs, increasingly look at other things that can distinguish one candidate from another. Volunteering, preferably in leadership roles and with organizations related to one's career goal, has become one of these ways in which young people can gain distinction on the labour market. Other ways to stand out from the crowd are through job placements, internships, having studied abroad, and so forth.
This sounds like a very reasonable way of making hiring and admission decisions, no doubt about that. After all, you want to hire and admit people into your programs who have gained some experience in the field and who know what they are getting themselves into. Yet there's also a somewhat darker side to this process, as the research I will be presenting and some other scholars' work suggests.
I'm going to start with a study in the U.K. that was published in 2009 by a group called the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions. Their report shows a somewhat troubling situation. It shows that although university enrolment has increased over the last few decades and become much more diverse than it used to be, at the same time the chances for low-income or working-class students to succeed in a professional career has declined. It's now harder for low-income or working-class students to become lawyers or doctors, at least in the U.K., than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
It's troubling, because such findings challenge our hope that success is based on merit. One of the key reasons for this development I've given in the report is the increase in the importance of unpaid work, such as volunteering and internships, in gaining access to professional opportunities.
To my knowledge—and you might correct me—we do not have data comparable to that in Canada. This is where my research can be of interest. I want to start with a small caveat. I do small-scale, interview-based research rather than large data analysis. I'm not making a claim that what I'm telling you right now can be generalized to all young people transitioning from education to work, but I am quite confident that the findings I am telling you about are of relevance and reflect the experiences of the young people I spoke to, and others who find themselves in similar situations.
In my study, I have followed about 40 young men and women over the four years of their undergraduate studies. They were all the first in their families to attend university. They all came from low-income or working-class backgrounds. All of them, it turned out, had incredibly high ambitions. Coming to university, they all wanted to end up in professional employment, and pretty much all of them ended up doing extremely well academically, at least those maintained in the study.
Yet, in the final interview I did with them in the fourth year of their undergraduate studies, they began to express to me very serious concerns about the ability to turn their academic success at university into later occupational success. The study participants spoke about not having the financial means to work for free as volunteers or unpaid interns, but also realized how important that has become to gain access to the kind of employment they were looking for. They also talked about lacking the right kinds of connections to get into those kinds of places in the first place. Perhaps you will allow me to give you a few examples.
Here's an example of a young woman who did exceptionally well at university. Throughout all her four years her goal was to go to medical school and become a doctor. In the end, that did not happen, but I'll come back to that. This is what she told me during the interview in her fourth year. “People that have more money have such an advantage in terms of what they can do. Like, they can just volunteer with the professor in a lab in the summer, and spend their whole summer doing that.... And then there's people like me that can't do that because they have to work 60 hours a week to pay for school. I was going to volunteer in a clinic in Nepal in second year, a whole bunch of my friends from residence went there to go do medical work; they loved it. And then I ended up not having enough money to go. Which is all right, but when I'm applying to med school or grad school, it gives those people who were able to do those things in the summer a leg up, so when I'm writing my med school application, I don't look as good.”
This was a very common observation throughout the data. For a lot of these young people, the need to make money limited and affected their ability to work for free to gain that work experience that is now becoming so important.
At the same time, the work experience they did gain—for instance, as supermarket cashiers, on roadside construction, in retail in the mall, and so forth—was never seen as relevant for the kinds of jobs, careers, and graduate programs they wanted to get into.
Similarly, the study participants spoke about not having connections in the career fields to which they aspired, and therefore did not know how to find the right opportunities. Again, I will give you a little quote from a young man who wanted to become a dentist. He was looking for volunteer opportunities in a dental office at the time we spoke, in his fourth year. This is what he said. “I would love to get into a dental office and volunteer just to be a dental assistant, just to be in the back cleaning tools. I'll clean toilets, I just want to be in the building. My one friend works with his dad's best friend in the summer and he sees every procedure and gets to do everything like that, and that looks really good on a resumé, doesn't it? I can't see me getting that opportunity, and I've been hounding dentists all over.”
These are just two examples that I'm giving you to highlight the disadvantages that arise when access to career and further education is strongly tied to extracurricular experiences, such as those gained in relatively exclusive forms of volunteering or work placements. In fact, I did manage to reinterview 20 of those 40 young men and women five years after they graduated, just a few years ago, and found out that out of the 20, only one ended up actually fulfilling his goal and going to medical school. Nobody else went to medical school or law school. Instead, people ended up either staying in graduate programs and doing criminology rather than law or found employment elsewhere. Many actually shifted their goals and rather than studying medicine became nurses. Nursing was a big shift in goals, I found.
Nobody made the case in those follow-up interviews that these changes, these shifting career goals, were the result of the types of disadvantages I mentioned, but they did tell me that they found that going into nursing was not only cheaper, which was a big issue for them, but that it also made it easier to get placement opportunities in a nursing or public health postgraduate program. Those who went to academia felt that maybe that would be more meritocratic than the other options they had initially considered.
Does that mean that employers' admission committees should not reward volunteer experiences? No, I wouldn't say that. I think volunteering is important. Volunteering in a legal aid office, or a law firm, or a school, or a hospital does offer important information, not just to employers, but it also helps young people to clarify career goals and gain very useful first-hand experience.
The point I'm trying to make, however, is that maybe we need to do a better job of levelling the playing field for young people to get access to such opportunities.
In conclusion, if you want professions to reflect the diversity of the populations they serve, we need to be aware of these types of potential barriers.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak.