UBC Vancouver's Main Mall with Flagpole Plaza in the background in April, 2025.Isabella Falsetti/The Globe and Mail
Canada needs to understand its universities and colleges as crucial instruments of national security. Allowing them to decline, during this time of national emergency, would jeopardize us economically, socially, politically and materially.
That thought occurred to me as I attended a distinctly Canadian graduation ceremony recently. It was from the academic bridging program at the University of Toronto’s Woodsworth College, which allows people lacking a typical secondary education to enter full-time university. The people around me included refugees who’d spent their teens in hiding, adults who had lost years to personal demons, kids whose educational paths had been cut off by the pandemic, and older immigrants who’d found the time and English fluency to escape the low-income grind.
Were it not for such programs, a share of these people would become liabilities – economically dependent, socially lagging behind parents and peers, and politically vulnerable to dark ideas.
Instead, they’re benefitting from Canada’s decades-long experiment in turning higher education into a majority privilege. According to 2025 figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, almost 65 per cent of Canadians aged 25 to 64 have completed university or college – the highest rate in the OECD, far above the U.S. rate of 51 per cent. And that has not diminished the value of a degree or diploma: Last year, Statistics Canada found that of Canada’s Class of 2020, 90 per cent are currently employed, 81 per cent with a job related to their studies. Their earnings premium is 39 per cent above those with only high school.
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But those gains are on shaky ground, as government commitments have faltered. Between 2015 and 2022, the share of budgets devoted to education fell from 11.6 to 10.4 per cent, and Canada’s public expenditure per student is down to US$13,700, below the OECD average of US$15,100. Some provinces such as Ontario have launched investments to restore the accessibility of higher education, and Ottawa funded a grant-based student-aid boost. But others, notably Quebec and Nova Scotia, are starving their postsecondary institutions for shortsighted fiscal reasons.
This is the very worst time for such declines. In fact, there should be a co-ordinated national program to maintain, and ideally increase, Canada’s postsecondary rate.
A highly educated population offers us three kinds of national security. The first is physical and political. Canadians have watched in horror over the last decade as democratic countries, most ominously the United States, have fallen to extremist movements, parties and leaders who have jeopardized the well-being of their own citizens and the peace and security of the world.
A decade of analyses have struggled to find the factor that causes citizens to choose anti-democratic leaders or embrace angry fallacies about race or immigration. Those don’t correlate strongly with race, sex, age, income, social class or geography. But they often do with one factor: Education level. People who’ve spent time in a university or college are far less prone to falling for dark delusions and the candidates who endorse them. Democratic backsliding is measurably a product of low education rates.
That doesn’t mean graduates are virtuous, or that those without letters after their name (like me) are democratic threats. But it does mean a country can defend itself against extremism and hate by raising the education rate. If Canada can move it up another notch, we’ll be more resistant to the awful ideas from the U.S., our parties less inclined to choose leaders who echo them.
The second form of security is economic. The long-term loss of a secure trading partner south of our border makes more urgent the need to shift our economic basis from resource extraction to sectors that are higher-value, higher-knowledge, more entrepreneurial and research-based, less geography-dependent, and higher-productivity.
That shift will require higher investment in physical capital, research and development, and also in human capital. This is not just a matter of further raising our postsecondary rate, but of changing its emphasis: More research-focused education, more diplomas and certificates in the skilled trades and building professions needed to build a new economy and new infrastructure.
Finally, higher education is our strongest tool of social security. It is the most effective instrument of socio-economic upward mobility, inequality reduction and newcomer integration.
Large-scale studies have shown that our wider access to higher education is a major reason why Canada has much higher rates of intergenerational economic mobility – the likelihood you’ll be in a higher class than your parents – than the United States, and why second-generation Canadians are even more successful in employment and income than their immigrant parents.
Those degrees and diplomas are worth far more than the parchment they’re printed on. They’re our shield against inequality and social division, against economic stasis, and against authoritarian tides. We should be printing even more of them.