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Wealthsimple Technologies Inc., one of Toronto’s top-ranked employers, is taking education out of consideration when hiring a new batch of interns.
Last month, the online financial services provider announced a year-long paid internship for recent high school graduates called Launchpad. Rather than requesting resumes and cover letters, the company is instead selecting six finalists based on video responses to three questions.
“One, why Wealthsimple? Two, what have you built in the past? And three, what would you fix at Wealthsimple?” says Diana McLachlan, the company’s chief people officer. “We want people that are curious, that have grit, that want to learn, that have a growth mindset and ask ‘why’ – those are the types of attributes and qualities that we support.”
The 12-month rotation will take participants through the product lifecycle journey. It begins in September with three months each in operations, then product innovation, ideation and design, then engineering and finally client success.
Upon completion Ms. McLachlan says participants can apply for a permanent role at the company, enroll in post-secondary school or seek employment elsewhere.
Post-secondary education remains the most common and direct pathway into the workforce and the only option in many industries and roles. However, employers such as Wealthsimple are also looking to move beyond traditional resume points like education and job experience toward what they feel are more objective evaluations of skills and attributes.
“Talent doesn’t just follow one path,” Ms. McLachlan says. “Some of the sharpest thinkers out there are already building, already thinking of the businesses that they want to develop, and fresh eyes often see things that others don’t.”
According to a recent study by Indeed, 79 per cent of Canadian hiring managers have implemented a “skills-first” hiring strategy.
“Only 55 per cent of Canadian employers see degrees as a top factor when evaluating candidates,” says Elise Marcotte, Indeed’s global talent intelligence enablement lead, who is based in Calgary. “What matters more today are transferable skills like critical thinking, adaptability and the ability to collaborate.”
Despite souring on the value of education and experience, the Indeed survey shows just 11 per cent of Canadian employers have removed them from their hiring process entirely.
Still, 93 per cent said it was more important for candidates to demonstrate an ability to learn quickly than to have a degree.
“Degrees aren’t going away, but they’re becoming less central in hiring decisions,” Ms. Marcotte says. “That shift is huge – it opens the door for more people to access quality roles, even if they don’t have traditional credentials.”
While many companies are struggling to shift their hiring practices, the study suggests those that have been able to look beyond education and experience have better retention, higher quality hires and a more diverse workforce.
Higher tuition challenges the ROI of higher education
Fueling the pushback against traditional degrees is the rising cost of tuition, coupled with concerns over whether they offer the same return on investment as in generations past.
Though university-degree holders earn about 40 per cent more than non-degree holders, according to a 2024 RBC study, the salary boost is declining relative to the cost of education.
While undergraduate tuition increased 12 per cent between 2012 and 2017, median incomes for those graduates rose just 4 per cent in their first five years in the workforce, between 2017 and 2022, once adjusted for inflation.
The gap was even greater among engineering, architecture and related science graduates whose tuition costs rose at a faster pace than other disciplines without similar increases to wages.
Over all, those who graduated in 2012 reported median wages of 10.6 times the cost of their final year’s tuition by 2017, while those who graduated in 2017 earned only 8.6 times more than a year’s worth of tuition.
“With tuitions rising as quickly as they were – both for domestic and international students – we did see a little bit of a deterioration in that return on investment, if you define that return in monetary terms,” says RBC economist Rachel Battaglia, who co-authored the report.
Though the direct return on investment from higher education may be in decline, Ms. Battaglia emphasizes that graduates receive a variety of other skills and benefits, ranging from practical life skills to networks and relationships.
Ms. Battaglia adds that provincially mandated tuition hike limits and a stronger labour market could improve that return in the years ahead.
“Wages are likely to pick up as the labour market strengthens in the back-half of 2026, and if tuition isn’t growing at that rapid pace, you’ll see the monetary ROI start to increase again,” she says.
High stress has many students re-evaluating post-secondary
But it’s not just concern over the rising cost of higher education or efforts by employers to reduce their emphasis on degrees in hiring that’s causing younger people to take a more critical look at post-secondary. Many are also shunning higher education for mental health and stress related reasons.
According to a 2025 study conducted by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation, emotional stress and mental health related concerns outrank affordability as the top reasons for delaying enrollment or dropping out of higher education in the United States.
“Gen Z is really leading in those concerns about mental health and putting mental health first,” says Courtney Brown, Lumina’s vice-president of impact and planning.
Confidence in higher education institutions is also dropping precipitously, according to another study by Gallup and Lumnia.
“Ten years ago, 60 per cent had lots of confidence in higher ed and very few had no confidence,” Ms. Brown says. “In our 2024 survey, only about a third of Americans had a lot of confidence in higher ed, while those who had no confidence in it went up to a third.”
In a follow-up survey, respondents cited political polarization as the top reason for losing confidence in higher education, followed by affordability and a deteriorating return on investment.
“Previous generations saw college as the only path to the middle class,” Ms. Brown says. “Gen Z sees it as an option among many and they’re making more calculated decisions about whether that option is worth the cost.”