Post-Secondary Student Choices and the Labour Shortage in Canada’s Information and Communication Technology Sector
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Les employeurs du secteur canadien des technologies de l’information et de la communication (TIC) affirment souvent être en butte à une pénurie de talents techniques. Cette situation peut être attribuable en partie au déclin abrupt des inscriptions aux programmes de premier cycle en génie et informatique et à celui des taux de diplomation dans ces disciplines que l’on observe au Canada depuis 2002. En dépit d’un récent renversement de tendance dans les inscriptions, le nombre de diplômés dans ces domaines demeure bien inférieur à la moyenne de l’Organisation pour la coopération et le développement économiques. Les auteurs analysent les compromis inhérents à de multiples politiques et programmes envisagés au Canada pour améliorer l’afflux de nouveaux diplômés dans ces champs d’études. Selon eux, bon nombre de programmes existants sont faciles à mettre en place et de courte durée, mais ils peuvent aussi avoir des répercussions indésirables en modifiant les décisions relatives au capital humain. En outre, plusieurs politiques existantes créent des incitatifs provoquant chez les étudiants des réactions qui diffèrent selon leur sexe, ce qui complique l’atteinte simultanée des deux objectifs que sont la réduction des pénuries de main-d’œuvre et la promotion de l’égalité entre les sexes sur le marché du travail dans le secteur des TIC. Les auteurs résument les constatations tirées des écrits sur l’économie de l’enseignement supérieur quant au choix de majeure des étudiants afin de suggérer des politiques et des programmes de remplacement d’une durée plus longue, permettant aux étudiants d’apprendre à connaître leurs préférences et leurs aptitudes. Abstract: Employers in Canada’s information and communication technology (ICT) sector often claim that they face a shortage of technical talent. This shortage may arise in part from a sharp decline in undergraduate engineering and computing enrolment and graduation rates in Canada beginning in 2002. Even with a recent reversal in enrolment trends, the number of graduates in these fields remains well below the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average. In this article, we discuss the trade-offs inherent in numerous policies and programs that have been considered in Canada to increase the supply of new graduates in these fields. We suggest that many existing programs are easy to implement and short term in nature but may also have unintended consequences by altering human capital investment decisions. Moreover, many existing policies create incentives that lead to different responses depending on student gender, thereby making it hard to simultaneously reduce labour shortages and boost gender equality in the ICT workforce. We summarize evidence from the economics of higher education literature on student major choice to point to alternative, more long-term policies and programs in which students can learn about their preferences and ability.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".