|
Governments across the country must ease up on funding cutbacks to higher
education or risk creating a desparate shortage of skilled workers in our
high-technology economy. Already, an estimated 20,000 jobs in the highly
paid technology field languish unfilled nationwide. Unless changes are
made, that number is predicted to reach an astonishing 300,000 in less than
15 years. In a sign of the times, next month, various levels of government and an organization representing 500 high-technology companies will send a trade mission to Europe. The mission, called Passport Canada, will travel to Roumania and Ukraine, former communist countries which once boasted completely state-funded education systems. Canadian companies are hoping to create an east-to-west brain drain, attracting engineers struggling in economies still in transition from state-run to open-market. But as Canada recruits abroad for the workers it needs, the federal and provincial governments need to answer the question of why these skilled specialists cannot be trained at home. [...] Compounding everything else is the fact that Canada also suffers from a brain drain, a one-way funnel that tends to get clogged with Canadians whenever the United States experience a shortage. A 1996 study by the Canadian Advanced Technology Association found that 75 per cent of electrical engineering and computer science students at the University of Waterloo intended to look for work in the United States when they graduated. [...] |
Roman Serbyn