The purpose of this document is to provide accurate and current information about the transition of college graduates into the labour market. This report includes information on the graduates from both the publicly-funded College of the North Atlantic and the private colleges that were in operation in 1996. We believe that this document will be a valuable career planning resource for high school teachers, guidance counsellors, postsecondary administrators and instructors and, most importantly, high school and postsecondary students.

The information in this report was derived from the Department of Education’s follow-up survey of 1996 postsecondary graduates. While the majority of these students graduated in the spring of 1996, all students graduating at any point from September 1, 1995 through to August 31, 1996 were included in the survey. Most of this telephone survey was conducted during the fall of 1997. Approximately 20% of the graduates were contacted in early 1998. The surveyors were instructed to call all of the graduates living in and out of the province. They were further instructed to pursue graduates with up to ten calls, if necessary, at the listed telephone number or at numbers provided by parents, roommates or other people contacted in the process. This method, while exhaustive, was necessary to ensure the best possible representation of the experience of 1996 graduates for the purpose of reporting detailed information at the program level.

The response rates for public and private college graduates in programs of all durations, listed on the page following, were very high. Response rates by program duration ranged from 63.9% to 70.7%. Two-page profiles for each program offered at each institution are included in the report for all programs for which there were five or more respondents. There were two notable exceptions to this rule. Program profiles for the College of the North Atlantic programs Petroleum Engineering Technology and Electrical Engineering Technology Biomedical are included. A list of the program profiles excluded due to having fewer than five responses is included in Appendix A.

In both the public and the private college systems, many different programs of varying durations are offered. As seen in the recent publication Postsecondary Indicators ’98 and previous graduate follow-up reports, the duration of a program exerts significant influence on graduate outcome indicators such as employment rates, student loan levels and graduate satisfaction levels. In the initial Key Findings section, a detailed analysis of the data from nine indicators has been listed by sector and program duration. This section provides a description of graduate outcomes and sets the framework for the main section of the report.

This document also includes an introductory Users’ Guide. This section is designed to assist readers in interpreting data in each of the tables in the two-page program profiles. This section also outlines particular strengths and potential weaknesses in the information.

The main section of the document consists of two-page Program Profiles that summarize and compare graduate results from each college program to the results from the combined pool of graduates from programs of a similar length from both the public and private sector. This comparison between the program and other programs of similar length is described for all of the nine indicators of graduate outcomes and earnings. For example, graduate results from a two-year diploma in Business Administration from College of the North Atlantic are compared to graduate results from all two-year programs in both sectors.