I've touched on some of the aspects of applied research and of actually funding applied research so we can advance productivity, but I'm going to turn my attention a bit more to the skills mismatch that I think the country is faced with right now.
As the committee has likely heard, we're one of the leaders in the OECD when it comes to post-secondary attainment. What we're finding, though, and what I hear routinely from those looking for talent and skills, is that there is a mismatch. There's a mismatch between those applying for positions and their ability to actually be ready for work. By that I mean those who actually have the work skills and are able to plug right in and help industry.
Part of that is work-integrated learning, which we're hearing about a lot. We're hearing a lot about the need to have students with experience come through the system. It's a hallmark of what we do in polytechnics and colleges inside Canada. We've done this for a long time, through either work placements or internships, as I said before, or through capstone projects where students work on actual projects from industry. I don't think we're getting the number of people we need at the doors of polytechnics and colleges soon enough in their learning journey.
We're seeing that the average age of learners at our doors is mid-to-late twenties. That means, when we dig into it, they have some other post-secondary learning inside our country. They've gone somewhere else, to a university, for example, and then when they're looking for employment—a stronger employment outcome—they come to the doors of polytechnics and colleges.
Other countries have been quite successful at reducing the average age, finding a short-circuit. We could tell the story within Canada that if you go to a college or polytechnic, your education is going to connect you to employment. You're going to have the skills necessary to do that.
For too long, we have said there isn't parity of esteem between educational outcomes, that one type of education has a stronger outcome than another. They're both equally important, and we have to stand both up equally. We need policies to be developed based on the parity of esteem. We need investment to follow that as well so we can have people ready.
Statistics are showing that youth unemployment for people with bachelor's degrees is far exceeding that of those who graduate with a college or polytechnic education—vocational types of education—and that gap is widening. If we're thinking about doing things like nation-building projects, the people for those projects, the people we're going to need to advance that type of work, are exactly the types of people coming out of our institutions.