The final of three Grade 12 classes in Athabasca County graduated last week, meaning a total of 151 local young adults must now chart a new course all their own — or reach for the stars, fly as high as they can, and quite possibly never stop believing, depending on which graduation adage they subscribe to.
What makes the Grassland grad class interesting is that every one of them will be enrolling in post-secondary education (as will many of their peers from Boyle and Edwin Parr schools). And while post-secondary can undoubtedly give one a boost towards the proverbial stars, it presents students with a number of earthly realizations very quickly, too.
For those students without help from their parents, an RESP or an unusually lucrative summer job, student loans will be one of the first new experiences they must navigate. The University of Calgary Students’ Union estimates that the average loan-receiving Alberta student got nearly $11,000 from the federal and provincial governments in 2011-12. The odd bit of grant money or loan forgiveness notwithstanding, that is all money that must be paid back — with interest (unless the borrower can manage to pay it all back within six months of leaving school).
The good news for Alberta students looking to get a job, whether it’s to pay off a debt or avoid getting saddled with it in the first place, is that the province is a leader in job creation. Of 95,000 jobs created Canada-wide in May of this year, Alberta accounted for 20 per cent, or nearly 19,000 of those jobs. It’s difficult to say if the job market will stay robust for the two to four years it takes to complete a diploma or degree program, but one can hope.
Half of the Grassland graduates have indicated they would like to go to business school — and notably, all the aspiring power suit-wearers are women. The next Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook’s chief operating officer) may be among us. However, it’s important to note, amongst all the “if you can dream it, you can do it” grad chatter, the reality facing women with a business bent. Females make up only 4.4 per cent of Fortune 500 CEOs, and none of the 60 largest publicly traded companies in Canada have female CEOs.
That’s not to say these young women — and all the graduates — won’t fly high and far. But it’s important to note the difficulties, whether related to finances, the job market or gender bias, that they will likely encounter. It’s not a straight, unbroken line to the stars, and that only makes whatever these graduates achieve even more worthy of recognition.
