Kate Davies and another student in the aircraft mechanics program work on a helicopter at NSCC's hangar in Dartmouth. Photo: Scott Lilwall

A new beginning at NSCC

When her six-year-old started school last year, Kate Davies knew what her daughter was going through.

That's because as Keanna was going off to school for the first time, Davies was heading back into the academic life for the first time in a decade.

"We were all going through something new for the first time ... I knew that if (she) came home cranky, it's probably because it was just a bad day," says Davies, who is now in her second year of the aircraft maintenance engineer program at Nova Scotia Community College.

For 10 years, the 34-year-old was an assembly line worker in a Dartmouth factory that built underwater sensors. When the industry fell on hard times, Davies found herself out of work. While many of her co-workers went out in search of a new job, Davies wanted something different.

"As soon as they passed me my layoff notice, I knew I had to go back to school to find something - a career; something that was stable," says Davies. "I knew that I needed something that there was actually going to be that at the end."

Davies joins a growing number of Canadians searching out education after high school. Statistics Canada shows that enrollment nation-wide in post-secondary education has been climbing at an average of 2.9 per cent per year since 1998. The economic decline may be changing who is filling out those college applications.

When the economy takes a hit, there's a general trend of people leaving the working world to get back to school, says Professor Fazley Siddiq, who studies labour economics at Dalhousie University. A lot of people see education as an investment, he says, but it isn't always attractive to leave a stable job to go back to school.

"In a recession, obviously, it's harder to generate income, harder to find a job," Siddiq said. "So you become a lot more reflective, a lot more realistic about your options. And for many people, education is the smart choice."

Siddiq likens unemployment to healthcare: it's something people don't think about much when they're healthy.

With more workers returning to the education system - some for the first time since high school - post-secondary institutions are finding that older students have different demands and needs than those fresh out of high school.

"They need to learn how to learn all over again," said Mike Hill, vice president academic at the Nova Scotia Community College. "They may be set in their ways, they may have misconceptions. They have learned things that are no longer current."

The challenge for colleges and universities, said Hill, is finding a way to help people who haven't been in a classroom for a while.

Courses need to be tailored to help them switch roles from employee to student. Add to that fact that older students also have to deal with a lot of the pressures outside the classroom, and Hill says it can be a stressful situation.

Davies agrees. Not only does she have homework and exams to deal with, but she also had to juggle being a single mother with two kids. Davies spends a lot of nights working on homework alongside Keanna and her other daughter, 13-year-old Darian. Not to mention the financial cost of going back to school. Davies says she had to take out loans and shoulder a good deal of debt to afford it.

Despite this, Davies says the idea of being an aircraft mechanic is exciting in a way that her assembly job never was. She thinks that if she had to lose her job to find a career, it was worth it.

"Getting laid off was and wasn't a blessing. Financially, it sucks. But career-wise, it was definitely something I'm glad for. Change is good."

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