In bureaucratic and academic circles, HQP is the acronym for Highly Qualified People (or Personnel if you like). According to Statistics Canada, the definition of an HQP is a person with at least a bachelor's degree from a university. For the last decade approximately, there has been a lot of sound and fury about the urgent need for more and more HQPs. In many professionals communities (such as researchers, engineers, information and telecommunication technologists), there is concern about the inadequate investment in human capital and its potential impact on the innovation agenda. How real is this?
Well, of course it's a complicated matter.
It is certainly the case for computer and information systems professionals there is a huge shortage of trained (never mind experienced) people; yet there are many unfilled undergraduate seats for computer science programs across North America.
But in Nova Scotia, Dalhousie University has recently taken heat from the Education Department over its participation with Memorial University to train more teachers. Teachers are obviously HQP. Reports have it that over 1 000 new teachers graduate per year, and there are less than 400 jobs in the province for them.
The employment record for PhD graduates is also mixed. Fewer than 50% of them will go on to academic jobs of any kind, never mind tenure track positions in research intensive universities, the position for which they are Highly Qualified. Of course some of them will go on to research-intense careers in governments or large corporations. But many of them will not. In summary, we are training people for careers that don't have have anywhere near enough capacity to absorb the graduates at the same time as we are unable to attract and retain students for careers that are crying out for people.
As a society, it does not seem like we are doing a very good job of allocating our scarce development resources in a way that is going to get the right mix of HQP. I don't know what the answer to this might be. But it is clear that we share responsibility with the students themselves. Somewhere, somehow, we have got to do a better job of teaching them how to do their own "due diligence" prior to starting down a path that is going to end with huge debt and poor prospects in their career of choice.
There is something quite wrong about this situation. It's just that the solution isn't likely to be simple or straightforward, especially in the face of the current institutional frameworks.
Sunny
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