What To Consider if You're Considering University — Taking Action

By Bill Morrison and Ken S. Coates

Going to university used to be a passport to future success, but that’s no longer the case. For some students, it’s still a good choice that leads to a successful career after graduation, but for many their degrees are worthless pieces of paper. Choose the wrong program and graduation is more likely to lead to disillusionment and debt than a steady paycheque.

Yet parents, guidance counselors, and politicians still push higher education as if it’s the only option for building a secure future. In this book, Ken S. Coates and Bill Morrison set out to explore the many educational opportunities and career paths open to Canadian high-school students and those in their twenties. This book is designed to help young adults decide whether to pursue a degree, enrol for skills training, or investigate one of the many other options that are available.

In this special excerpt, we consider the world outside academia and some real-world options, such as:

1. Volunteering as a Launch Pad

2. Travel: Discover the World

3. Entrepreneurship: Why Wait to Be Your Own Boss?

4. Give Work a Chance

5. Apprenticeship and the Skilled Trades.

This book will help you consider all the options in a clear, rational way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Jul 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781459730137

Book preview

Columbia

CHAPTER SIX

VOLUNTEERING AS A LAUNCH PAD

Be Part of the Engaged Minority

What a contradictory lot you young people are these days! Reporters, always keen to know what you’re thinking, say that you have a strong interest in helping the poor, engaging with the world, and working for social justice. The truth is, however, that many young people are far more interested in social media, video games, and earning money. This is only natural — asked to tick off your interests, you of course will choose saving the environment over hoisting some brews — even as you head off to the pub.

But you aren’t all like this: for a minority of young people, engagement with community is a crucial part of their lives. They have already been actively working, through their faith communities, Boy Scouts or Girl Guides, co-operatives, environmental groups, and other agencies to better the world. These young people — and the adults who inspire them — are the backbone of society, and critical to our pursuit of social justice in our time. It is to them, and to people who might like to be like them, that this chapter is addressed.

Volunteerism, though certainly praiseworthy, is not often seen as a strong element in career building. It is viewed as a time out, a separate activity that responds to the spiritual or social justice part of a person’s make-up, rather than as an integral part of personal or professional development. We wouldn’t want to downplay the humanitarian zeal and the concern for others that drives the volunteer impulse. At the same time, we want to emphasize that it can be extremely valuable to your career and your adult life.

Volunteer as a Way of Giving Something Back

Let’s dispense right away with the cynical approach to volunteerism as a means of puffing up your résumé. In the United States, where competition to get into the elite universities and colleges is intense, having impressive volunteer activities on your record can push your application closer to the top of the pile. Employers, too, love to see signs that there is a heart and soul behind the job experience and credentials

So, of course, a few enterprising individuals seize the opportunity to make some money from the altruism of others. There are actually companies that charge a fee to match students’ interests with volunteer opportunities. They realize that their clients want to be seen helping the disadvantaged, but without getting their hands dirty or dealing with really poor or sick people. These firms, shamefully, match clients with highly visible volunteer opportunities — good for Facebook pages and résumés but actually accomplishing very little. At their worst, these involve staying at a high-end hotel and making brief visits to an orphanage in a developing country or an AIDS hospice so that the client can be photographed helping the disadvantaged. Unimpressive, to be sure, and so transparent that this system is unlikely to fool people for long — though there seems to be money to be made in it. If you hire one of these outfits to make you look good, shame on you too.

We don’t want to be chauvinistic, a Canadian failing we often ascribe to the Americans, but we really are lucky to live in this country. By both historical and global standards, people in this country are among the richest in the world. Remember that there are more than a billion people who exist on less than $1 a day — less than the cost of a regular chocolate bar, or half the daily cost of your cellphone contract.

It’s hard to put a firm number on the relative wealth of Canadians, but let’s give it a go. Wealth is defined in many ways, most typically by individual and family income. By these standards, Canada has long ranked comfortably in the top ten countries in the world. But money in the pocket is only one measure of wealth. A wealthy person or wealthy society should be able to count on many non-monetary benefits. After all, what value is it to have stacks of money, but live in constant fear or being robbed or killed, as is the case in too many countries. So, a proper measure of wealth should include other factors — such as life expectancy, access to health care, educational opportunities, the status of women and children in society, safety within the home and the community, freedom from war and domestic strife, fresh water, non-polluted air, freedom from hunger, and decent shelter and clothing. By these standards, the average Canadian is probably in the top 2 percent of all of the people who have ever walked the face of the earth.

If you have any kind of social conscience, you will have to agree that our wealth carries at least some national and global obligations. (If you don’t, feel free to say whatever and skip the next few pages, but remember that you will be missing some real rewards.) People have, arguably, an obligation to give back — through their effort or their money — to the less advantaged among them. Many Canadians feel that the federal and provincial governments handle these responsibilities at the local, regional, and national level — funded, of course, from tax revenue paid by all Canadians — and that Ottawa discharges our global responsibilities through foreign aid contributions.

The uncomfortable fact is that, in terms of proportion of Gross Domestic Product devoted to foreign aid, Canada is fourteenth on the list of donor countries at 0.32 percent; the top countries, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, give more than 0.8 percent of GDP. Our commitment to foreign aid has never reached the internationally recommended target of 0.7 percent of GDP, and historically much of our aid has