I was present at the University of Ottawa’s graduation exercises yesterday for its arts faculty. In the tedium of watching 1,000 unrelated young people receive degrees, there is little to do but notice the sex, ethnicity and nationality of the graduates. Here are my observations:
- It was 80% female, not 70% female. One in five arts graduates were male. Whether this portends a disaster for male status and income is a topic for another blog.
- Africans and Haitians. There was a large contingent of African and Haitian young women graduating. Clearly we need have no fear that African immigrants to Canada are problematic; they are climbing the ladder of success as fast as they can.
- I might have counted two Jews out of 1000. Where are the Jews? When I attended McGill in the sixties, about 75% of the arts faculty was Jewish. Have they gone to better universities? Other universities?
- Muslims were far fewer than Africans, who seemed about one in ten graduates, though they were probably fewer in fact.
There you have it. Expect more educated African-Canadian women in your workforce, and fewer males of all races and ethnicities.