Highly skilled people are key to the creation, commercialization, and diffusion of innovation. Doctorate holders are not only the most qualified in terms of educational attainment, but they are also specifically trained to conduct research.
Almost. Canada’s graduation rate of doctoral students is strikingly low compared with its performance on other measures of education completion (high school, college, and university) and compared with its peers. Canada ranks in last place.
There are a number of reasons for Canada’s weakness on this indicator. According to a report by the Canadian federal government:
Some attribute this weak demand for advanced degrees to the management skills of Canadian corporate leaders. Canadian managers are less likely to have a university education than U.S. managers, and are about half as likely to have a university business degree. American financial professionals are twice as likely to have an advanced university degree as their Canadian counterparts. Others attribute the weak demand to an over-reliance on cost reduction, rather than innovation, as the main competitiveness strategy among Canadian firms. Canadian businesses and other organizations need to recognize, reward, and make better use of the skills, talent, and knowledge of our current graduates. This, in turn, will help foster greater interest among Canada’s young people to pursue S&T and related studies and careers, fostering a virtuous circle of talent generation and mobilization.2
This would appear to be a structural issue for Canada, as it consistently produces proportionately fewer Ph.D.s than comparator countries. Despite the importance of Ph.D. graduates to innovation, Canada’s private sector does not provide strong enough incentives for students to strive for advanced science and technology skills and for business management skills. Compared to firms in the U.S., Canadian firms across most industries hire fewer Ph.D. graduates and pay them less; this may be one reason why there are fewer students pursuing doctoral studies in Canada.3
Furthermore, Canada’s education system simply does not stimulate enough students to complete post-graduate degrees, especially in the science and technical disciplines that underpin innovation, because funding is too widely dispersed among an expanding number of universities. While Canada has an above-average rate of high-school, college, and university completion—which testifies to the effectiveness of the education system for most participants—it does not work as well for the more educated and innovative people at the high-end of the spectrum. Consequently, Canada has been able to fund only a handful of world-class research universities that attract talented people to study in Canada at the doctoral level.
Although Canada increased its number of Ph.D. graduates by 8 per cent in 2007, it has earned a "D" on this indicator since 1998, the earliest year for which internationally comparable data are available. The top spots have consistently been taken by Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland.
Canada ranked 12th out of 15 peer countries (data were not available for Belgium and Denmark) in 1998. It slipped to last spot in 2007.
We could ask what it would take for Canada to improve to an “A” level, but even improving to a “C” will be a challenge. Australia, a low-ranked “C” country, has 750,000 fewer people in the 25- to 29-year-old cohort, yet it graduated 950 more Ph.D.s than Canada in 2007. Canada would need to have increased its number of Ph.D. graduates by 3,800 in 2007 to match Australia. Even if Australia’s performance stabilized and Canada continued to grow its number of Ph.D. graduates at the same rate as in 2007, Canada would not catch Australia until 2014.
Use the pull-down menu to compare Canada’s Ph.D. graduates with those of its peers.
Canada will remain a "D" player for some time. Its poor performance here is a serious concern that does not bode well for the future. The failure to fund world-class universities is one explanation for Canada’s comparative weaknesses in high-level academic achievement—and its associated weaknesses in innovation. Furthermore, Canada offers fewer employment and pay incentives than do other countries to encourage students to pursue doctoral studies.
1 The 25–29 age cohort was chosen because the OECD reports that this range is typical for advanced research program graduates in our comparator countries. OECD, Education at a Glance 2009 (Paris: Author, 2009), p. 449.
2 Industry Canada, Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage (Ottawa: Author, 2007), p. 32.
3 Industry Canada, Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage (Ottawa: Author, 2007), p. 31.