Section 6: Limitations and future analyses

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This report provides an initial glimpse into the timing of the start of the first post-secondary program of high school graduates in Canada. It is intended to offer a useful background for future work that could explore the issue in more detail. Three limitations of the current study that should be addressed in future work focus on the following issues: activity during the gap year; type of first PSE institution; and lack of some important control variables.

An important avenue for future research would be to explore the types of activity that students engage in during the 'gap' period. Was the time away from school 'productive'? Were the gappers working? If so, what was the quality of the jobs they held? If they were not working, what were they doing? Were they travelling? If so, what were they doing on their travels? For example, were those travels organized, were they working abroad?

These are important concerns that can only be partially addressed with the YITS data. For example, using YITS, it should be possible to determine work patterns for the majority of high school graduates who did not go on to PSE directly using monthly activity variables. There is no information on other activities the high school graduate may have done during the time away from school. The information regarding employment is important, however, since it provides a look at early labour market experiences and provides an indicator as to whether youth were involved in something productive during their time away from school. What these employment variables cannot tell us, however, is whether the high school graduates gained anything from their experiences and whether it was beneficial in terms of increasing their maturity (Heath 2007). A more specialized survey would be needed to acquire this type of information.

Another useful avenue for further research would be to examine the relationship between having a gap between high school and the type of first PSE institution. There is a great deal of heterogeneity between university, college, trade and technical school in terms of entrance requirements and eventual labour market outcomes. It may be that different patterns of timing would be observed depending on which type of PSE program youth pursued following the gap period. For instance, high school graduates who go to university typically must expend more time and money than those who go to college, since university programs tend to be longer and more expensive. As a result, those going on to university who needed to work during their time away may spend more time out of the education system than those who pursued college studies. YITS information on the type of first PSE institution is held in institution and program rosters that are updated every survey cycle. Utilizing this type of information would allow for analyses using a 'competing risk' approach, with different types of PSE institutions considered to be competing because they are mutually exclusive, i.e., only one type of transition can occur at a given point in time.

Finally, future research could include selected control variables that were not included in the analysis reported here. For instance, marks were used as a measure of academic ability; however, these are self-reported and may be subject to bias (Maxwell and Lopus 1994). A better measure would be objective academic test scores on various subjects. For instance, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) includes three objective test scores related to reading, mathematics and science. In Canada, PISA is linked with the 15-year old cohort of YITS (Bushnik, Barr-Telford, and Bussière 2004; Bussière, Cartwright, Crocker, Ma, Oderkirk and Zhang 2001). These measures, especially the reading assessment, have been used extensively. For example, Knighton and Bussière (2006) found that high reading scores at age 15 were strongly related to a greater chance of graduating from high school and to a greater likelihood of enrolment at a post-secondary institution by age 19. The relationship between test scores and probability of delaying PSE attendance would likely be the same as those found here using marks. However, it remains an interesting avenue of research to pursue in the future.

Another useful measure that could be included in future analyses is distance between high school and post-secondary institution. Frenette (2006) for example found that young adults who lived outside commuting distance to a university had a lower likelihood of attending university. In the current paper, the only factor that can approximate for this is the use of the indicator of population size of the community in which the respondent lived, which indicated that youth from areas of greater population size were less likely to delay the transition to PSE. Thus, a greater distance from university would likely also slow down the timing to first enrolment.