Ahnaf Shahid reached his tipping point in June.
It had been a year since he graduated with a computer science degree from Toronto Metropolitan University, but he still hadn’t been able to land a job.
“I was applying to jobs almost every day and getting frequent rejections,” he said.
The seemingly never-ending search for a job has been disheartening, with Shahid saying the constant rejections have led him to therapy for the first time. He also feels lost after being told growing up that if he went to university, especially to study engineering or health care, he’d be set for life.
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“Nothing is a guarantee anymore,” he said. “Even if you’re working hard or applying for jobs every day.”
Now Shahid is applying to graduate school programs around the GTA for the winter semester in hopes of finding “something else” — and he’s not the only recent university grad choosing to do so.
Amid a Canadian job market where young people are facing their highest unemployment rate outside of the pandemic since the mid-1990s, some young adults who are tired of being rejected or ghosted by employers appear to be turning to higher education in hopes of bolstering their credentials or putting off entering the job market for a couple years.
It’s not that these young people aren’t qualified.
Those who spoke to the Star all had graduated from esteemed Canadian universities within the past few years with internships, co-ops and other work experience under their belts. Even referrals from past coworkers or friends don’t seem to be enough to land a job.
For Matthew Ritchie, an incoming second-year computer science grad student at TMU, the decision to get his master’s degree came during his final year of undergrad, when he realized he’d be competing for the same tech industry jobs as thousands of other young people.
“Over the last 10 years, there was this whole joke that you should ‘learn to code’ and so now everybody learned to code,” he said.
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“I decided it would be better to stand out amongst my peers if I got a master’s or even a PhD.”
(Since starting his grad program, Ritchie said he’s decided to leave the tech industry altogether, instead opting to get a PhD to become a professor.)
Ritchie added that he also wasn’t dissuaded by the fact that being in grad school meant not getting a salary beyond being paid for working as a teacher’s assistant or doing research for a professor.
Shahid made a similar assessment when he started applying for graduate programs.
“Either way I’m not getting a salary since I’ll be unemployed,” he said.
Ian Wereley, the executive director of the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies, said that while it would make sense for interest or enrolment in graduate school to see an uptick, the association hasn’t seen any significant increases for the upcoming year or recent years.
“Poor economic environments or uncertain technological developments that can kind of uproot traditional career paths, those moments in history do tend to lead more students into graduate programs,” he said, pointing to the 2008 recession or the rise of the internet in the 1990s as examples.
“But what we’re seeing now actually deviates from past patterns.”
For Wereley, it’s too early to be able to explain why current interest and enrolment trends aren’t in line with the surge one would expect during tough economic times. He noted that the higher education sector is undergoing a “massive amount of change” as universities grapple with the rise of AI, government policies targeting international student enrolment and the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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“We don’t really know where it will end up,” he said.
Still, despite Wereley’s uncertainty around the future of universities and colleges, some young people believe getting multiple degrees from these institutions is their best option for overcoming the tough job market.
When Rachel Yee graduated with a psychology degree from the University of Waterloo in the spring of 2022, she knew that she would need to get a master’s.
“I feel like as an arts student, I would say it’s kind of expected” to go to grad school, she said.
As Yee wraps up her industrial engineering graduate program at the University of Toronto’s downtown campus, she is already applying for PhD programs.
“There’s no jobs,” she said. “You keep seeing the same job postings, but they’re not hiring.”
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