Aboriginal Education

Topic Box from the 2011 Final Benchmark Report

It is well-known that the educational outcomes of Canada's Aboriginal people are very poor relative to those of non-Aboriginal people. As a result, Canada's Aboriginal population is vulnerable to joblessness, low-income status and economic deprivation. Differences in educational attainment account for approximately 30 percent of the annual earnings gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians.

In British Columbia and across Canada, Aboriginals who live off-reserve are more likely to have completed high school than those living on-reserve. The proportion of British Columbians aged 20-64 who had a high school diploma (or equivalent) in 2006 was 73.6 among Aboriginals living off-reserve and just 56.5 percent for those living on-reserve. Aboriginals, both on- and off-reserve, were less likely than non-Aboriginals to have completed high school.

Table 1 illustrates many important patterns. The pattern of high school completion rates over the lifecycle is similar for the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal populations and does not differ qualitatively between British Columbia and Canada. The only exception (but a very significant one) is that the completion rate among the Canada-wide population of on-reserve Aboriginals is actually lower for the young cohort (20-24) than for the older cohorts. This suggests that on-reserve education systems across Canada have been particularly unsuccessful in fostering high school completion over the past five to ten years. British Columbia’s reserves have bested the national average by achieving above-average completion rates in every age cohort, and the completion rate among the province’s on-reserve population of 20-24-year-olds is higher than the rate among the 55-64-year-olds.

British Columbia also has a substantially lower gap between the educational performance of on-reserve and off-reserve Aboriginals than Canada as a whole. In Canada, the gap in educational outcomes between on- and off-reserve Aboriginals is much larger for young people than for older people. Relative to the Canadian average, British Columbia's outcomes gap is smaller in magnitude for every age group and is more stable across age groups.

The recent addition of self-identified Aboriginals to the Labour Force Survey provides provincial level gaps on education attainment, employment and unemployment. Table 2 shows that Aboriginal youth (aged 19 to 24) in BC are more than three times as likely to lack high school graduation as non-Aboriginals.

Table 3 shows that Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal employment rates for those aged 25 to 64 with a post-secondary credential were close in 2007 but that employment deteriorated more rapidly and much further for Aboriginals than Non-Aboriginals in the recent recession. Table 3 also reveals that Aboriginal unemployment rates are roughly double those of Non-Aboriginals and that the Aboriginal unemployment increase was larger in 2009 and that the improvement in 2010 was smaller than for non-Aboriginals.

In 2007, similar proportions of Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals were identified as "not in the labour force," which means they were unwilling or unable to supply labour services. By 2010, the proportion of non-Aboriginals outside the labour force was lower but the Aboriginal proportion was much higher than in 2007.

Improving the educational outcomes of Aboriginal people should be a top priority for policymakers, both for equity reasons and because evidence suggests that improved education among people from disadvantaged backgrounds can yield substantial returns in the form of enhanced productivity.

The recent BC Progress Board advisory report "Human Capital and Productivity in British Columbia" provides much more information on Aboriginal education and labour force outcomes as well as recommendations for improvement.