I'll start with the apprenticeships. Quite often, it seems to me that apprenticeships are a second-best option for a lot of families. We think of it as a career pathway that we channel people into who maybe don't do too well at school. I think there needs to be a rethinking. There needs to be a rethinking that we look at apprenticeships as a valuable career pathway for anybody, just the same way we think of university as a pathway for which you need to qualify in certain ways. I think apprenticeships require a certain frame of mind, a certain type of interest, and certain kinds of goals that people have rather than something we channel people into.
How can we increase it? I know high schools have done a lot more to promote apprenticeships, but the reality often is that most people who advise young students in high school have come through the academic system and this is something they're far more comfortable with, something they understand. It's a pathway they can help students with, whereas apprenticeships aren't. Apprenticeships remain a foreign pathway that most high school counsellors probably don't know too much about. We also know that often in schools it's the shop programs and the trades programs that are being shut down because they're not cheap; they're expensive and need equipment. If you want young people to have access to good equipment, it needs to be constantly updated. There's a dilemma there. We steer people away from this in school, and it's not entirely surprising that in Canada most of the people who enter apprenticeship training are in their twenties or later. They're doing it as maybe not a second career, but as something they go into long after they finish high school.
There are ways that we maybe need to shift how we think about that. It's hard to say how you can do that successfully, because despite all the youth apprenticeship programs in Alberta, Ontario, and all the other provinces across Canada, the enrolment rates remain stubbornly low. We still have only a small percentage of the labour force training in the trades. We haven't seen a huge increase in that. It's something that we certainly need to look at, and we need to do more research to find out, maybe with younger people, what the reason is.
The problem is that there's also a public debate, a public discourse that suggests you're not anything until you get a university degree. It's becoming this fundamental minimal thing you need to achieve in order to be successful. Even some of the apprentices I interviewed have said things like that. They're successful as apprentices and sometimes they'll say they wonder if they should maybe give university a chance in a few years. There's this sort of mindset.
About the geriatric workforce, my sense is that it's similar to what we see in apprenticeships. It's an area that people enter later in life. A lot of people retrain to do geriatric work once they're a bit older, maybe once they've had some personal experience doing this with parents or other family members. I don't do research in schools so I don't really know what very young people think, but as a sociologist I can tell you my department does studies in gerontology. There's not a lot of student interest in this, and I guess young people are simply not interested in what happens to old people. They don't want to think about that. This is where the big crisis looms. We need to somehow have a workforce in place that cares for our aging population, and we need to know what the population pyramid—well, it's not a pyramid anymore—or the population profile looks like. I think we need ways to let young people know about these options at an earlier age, and we need to involve employers more actively in coming out and speaking to young people.