When Kaleigh Quinn decided to enrol in grad school last year, it wasn't because she had fallen in love with the ivory towers of academia.
If anything, her decision to pursue her master's in education immediately after completing her bachelor's degree last May has increased her time spent in the working world.
On top of a full course load, Quinn often works 50 hours a week at four jobs to pay for her education.
"The bachelor's (degree) certainly made me employable," says Quinn, studying English-as-a-second-language program development at the University of Manitoba. "But a master's degree will make me more eligible for a wider diversity of positions."
Quinn's timing likely couldn't be better. By the time she graduates in 2011, Canada's economy should be purring along, economists predict.
After one of the worst recessions in modern history, and in the midst of a jobless recovery where corporations have shed jobs to return to profitability, many former university graduates may be considering returning to school to beef up their future job prospects.
But even before the recession, graduate-student enrolment had been on the rise. A Statistics Canada report last year found graduate-student enrolment in Canada increased 31 per cent between 2002 and 2008.
It's a figure that's not at all surprising to Liz Gonzalves, working on a master's degree in molecular epidemiology at the U of M.
"As I was coming to the end of my undergrad, I was doing a part-time job in a lab, and I was afraid that I was going to be stuck there, because a lot of people that I worked with in the lab had been there a long time," says the 33-year-old. "In my field, if you don't at least have a master's, you don't have any qualifications."
Once Gonzalves completes her degree in 2011, however, her school days won't be over just yet. "Ultimately, I'm going to continue on to law school after this," she says. "I'm looking at trying to create a job for myself in the Canadian government with regards to bioethics and biotechnology."
According to economic forecasts on labour-force demand in the next decade, Gonzalves has the right idea.
Economist Diana Petramala, who prepares job forecasts for TD Economics in Toronto, says the more education you have, the better your job prospects will be.
"If you want to find a good-paying, full-time job, they're hard to come by unless you do have higher education," Petramala says. "All the manufacturing and low-skill jobs are giving way to service-sector jobs."
The shift in labour demand, however, is not a new development.
"If you look at manufacturing, it's fallen significantly over the last decade," she says. "Certain services have been picking up the slack -- professionals, scientific and technical services."
Petramala says Canada's job growth will largely be driven by domestic growth in the next few years. In particular, the health sciences and services sector will show tremendous growth.
"We have an aging population that will require a large amount of health-care resources."
The expected wave of retirement among boomers, which was delayed because of the downturn, will also leave a vacuum of highly skilled labour jobs that need to be filled, especially when it comes to management positions, she says.
In the meantime, however, the skilled workers of the future need to find the financial means to pay for their education today.
And post-secondary education doesn't come cheaply, particularly graduate studies, says Dave Ablett, director of tax and retirement planning at Investors Group.
Ideally, Canadians should be saving years in advance to pay for post-secondary education, using Registered Education Savings Plans, to which the government will contribute grant monies. But people considering going back to graduate school to increase their employability because of lacklustre job prospects often do not readily have funding in place.
"If you're looking at somebody who has been in the workforce for seven or eight years, one source of funding they can use is their RRSP through the Lifelong Learning Plan, which allows you to make a tax-free withdrawal from your RRSP for either yourself or your spouse to pursue education," Ablett says.
Individuals can draw up to $10,000 a year from their own RRSP or a spouse's during a four-year period, to a maximum of $20,000.
After completing school, they have up to 10 years to replace the money.
"You are not required to pay back any of it to your RRSP, but if you don't, you are required to declare it as income," Ablett says. "For some people, if they weren't able to find employment after completing their degree, they may choose to deliberately not make that payment, because then they would, in effect, not pay tax on that amount if it's all they had to report as income."
In many cases, however, $20,000 may not be enough to cover the cost of graduate school and additional funding is required.
"If you're looking at an MBA program, you're probably looking in the range of $40,000 to $50,000," he says.
Ablett says individuals with a spouse who is working or who have significant savings themselves, often do not qualify for funding such as student loans. In those circumstances, they should consider accessing other savings they might have built up while employed, such as a tax-free savings account or a home-equity loan.
Despite the cost of additional years of graduate education, Ablett says it's often worth it in the long run.
"One of the things that people should consider is the average income of a person with one degree is about $58,700, whereas the average income of somebody with a graduate degree is just over $69,000," he says.
"So in the short run, you are sacrificing current income, but it could be that you will be generating extra income in your later years once you have obtained that graduate degree."
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Does a poor economy equal higher grad-student enrolment?
At the University of Manitoba, graduate studies enrolment is down this school year compared to last year, says Trish Kelley, vice-president internal with the University of Manitoba Graduate Students' Association. She says it wasn't a significant decrease and likely doesn't represent a trend. Kelley says when she began working on her doctorate in environmental science in 2006 during a strong economy, she heard then it was an ideal time to be in graduate school. "When I started graduate school, everyone was telling us it would be ideal conditions for a job when I graduated because everyone would have been retiring, and now it's not the case," she says. "I'm little bit more anxious about my job prospects because people are staying at their jobs longer because they lost so much out of their retirement plans."
When it comes to grants and scholarships, start now
U of M graduate student Kaleigh Quinn says don't delay in applying for funding for graduate school. "If you want to be funded while you're in school, whenever you put your application in, start looking for funding the same day," she says. Tuition and other related costs run at about $4,500 a year for most graduate studies programs, says Kelley. Unlike undergrads, graduate students have not seen any increases in their tuition at the U of M, she says. But scholarships are harder to come by since the economic downturn as corporations have cut back on their educational support programs. Still, some graduate students, particularly those getting PhDs, might get funding from organizations with a vested interest in the results of their research. "It's not just 'I got good grades and got a scholarship,'" says Kelley, who studies whale feeding and mating habits in the Arctic.
"Especially in my field, where I'm required to be away for parts of the summer, it does help to have funding because of the amount of time you need to devote to your work."
