Increasingly, Ontario graduates shun teacher’s college

The number of applicants to Ontario teacher’s colleges has dropped in half since 2007, hitting its lowest point in sixteen years.

Data was published in January by the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre, which serves as a clearinghouse for university applications, indicate that 8,199 people applied to Ontario teacher’s colleges this past January, compared to 16,042 in January 2007.

The falloff in interest in a teaching career seems directly linked to Ontario’s pitilessly bleak job market for both new – and not-so-new – teaching graduates. (Labour unrest can’t help, either.)

The main problem new teaching graduates face in finding a job in Ontario is that they vastly outnumber older teachers retiring.

Ontario expanded teaching education in the mid-2000s in response to what turned out to be a one-off bubble of retirements, as a wave of teachers hired in the 1960s reached retirement age and the eligibility point for a pension relaxed.

“I wouldn’t say it was a mistake,” says Frank McIntyre of the Ontario College of Teachers, who has studied the issue at length. “We had a significant shortage of teachers in the period 1998-2002, so we had to expand teacher education at that point, but it was short-term. And the problem is that teacher education capacity has been maintained at a fairly high level.”

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Around the turn of the century, McIntyre explains, there were about nine new teachers entering the system for every seven retiring.

“That, I see, is roughly in a balance, because some people leave the profession. In that period, we were finding that very few new teachers were having trouble finding jobs.”

In 2008, by contrast, over 12,000 people became qualified to teach in Ontario, while only 4,700 retired.

Of 2010 teaching graduates looking to be hired for the 2010-11 teaching year, a sobering OCT study found, one third were unemployed and another third marginally employed, with only one in eight hired into regular teaching jobs. As more and more teaching graduates can’t find permanent work, the traditional entry level of supply teaching and short-term contracts has been filled with new teachers who can’t move on. Year by year, “each new group of teachers has entered an increasingly competitive job market.”

McIntyre offers no hope of a new wave of retirements opening room for new teachers (“The bulge has retired”), although labour unrest this year is expected to increase Ontario teacher retirement by 30-35%, which would mean about 6,000 retirements. Teachers are expected to retire at a fairly constant rate into the forseeable future.

Demographics aren’t helpful to would-be teachers, either – a 2009 report pointed out that Ontario’s school-age population is in a long-term decline, a trend also seen elsewhere in Canada and in other Western countries. That puts the assumption that retiring teachers will be replaced on a 1:1 basis in doubt.

“I was aware that the job market was challenging, but it was hard to get an idea of how challenging it was,” explains Matthew Buttler, who couldn’t find teaching work after graduating in education in 2011 from the University of Ottawa. He now works for a technology company.

“I’m sort of having to make the best of it. I would consider teaching high school in the future, if there was any viable option for me to get into it. Everything has to come together for you to be able to teach, and it just didn’t come together for me.”

Teaching graduates have communications skills that can be transferred to other fields, says Fiona Blaikie, dean of Brock University’s Faculty of Education:

“It’s not just about becoming a teacher in a classroom. It’s about a lot more than that. It would be like saying, ‘Well, if you do a graduate degree in English, all you’re going to be is a professor.’ And that’s not true.”

“There are jobs in the system if young graduating teaching candidates are prepared to move up north, live in aboriginal communities, or they’re prepared to go overseas. If you want a job around the corner from your parents’ house, that’s probably going to be less likely.”

Funding cuts announced in 2010 have taken 848 spaces out of Ontario teacher’s colleges, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities explained. Starting in the 2012-13 school year, retired teachers are capped at 50 teaching days a year, down from 95.

Blaikie doubts that government can successfully match the numbers of teaching graduates to available jobs:

“Government doesn’t cap the number of people coming in to do a PhD degree in English,” she says. “The government tried to do this with nursing a few years ago: They tried to engage in social engineering of seeing how many nurses we need. And they failed miserably. And there was a huge nursing shortage.”

All that said, Blaikie is “very optimistic” about teacher education in Ontario:

“I think that things will continue to evolve,” she says. “I don’t think it’s a crisis at all.”