The Case You Stopped Making for a Degree

By Midya U · Midya U Advisory

In brief: Ottawa put roughly $6 billion behind training 80,000 to 100,000 new Red Seal trades workers by 2030-31, and Canadians already recommend the trades over a general university degree by two to one. Meanwhile 71% of parents want to hear from institutions and 69% say what arrives is not useful. You have the audience and the send schedule already. Fix what you put in them, starting with a net price a family can plan around.

For two years the international file has taken all the oxygen. Caps, permit rules, levels plans, and a marketing team rebuilding its assumptions every quarter. The domestic pipeline has been treated as the steady part of the business, the thing you get back to once the emergency passes.

It stopped being the steady part sometime in the last eighteen months, and the shift is easier to miss because nothing about it looks like a crisis.

Who is competing for your domestic students?

The trades, and as of 2026 they have a federal budget line.

Ottawa announced Team Canada Strong in April 2026, a plan to recruit and train 80,000 to 100,000 new Red Seal skilled trades workers by 2030-31. The spring economic update put roughly $6 billion behind training young people for those careers, routed mainly through colleges, union training centres and apprenticeships.

Public opinion had already moved. Research from Toronto Metropolitan University's Diversity Institute found Canadians were twice as likely to recommend trades or apprenticeship training to a young person, at 56%, as they were to recommend a general university program, at 26%.

So the comparison a seventeen-year-old is making at the kitchen table now has a well-funded campaign on one side of it. On the other side, in most cases, is a viewbook.

What do parents say they are weighing?

Price, ahead of everything else.

EAB surveyed 2,515 parents in the spring of 2026 about the college search. The overall price came first at 64%, then school fit at 50%, financial aid at 41%, and mental wellbeing at 40%. Post-graduation job prospects sat lower at 29%, though that figure had climbed 81% since the same survey in 2024.

That ranking describes what parents worry about while they shop. Ask what the degree is for and jobs move to the front. The Princeton Review surveyed 9,446 applicants and parents between January and February 2026, including respondents in Canada, and 43% named better job prospects and higher income as the main benefit of a degree, ahead of exposure to new ideas at 31% and the education itself at 26%. In the same survey, the share naming debt as their single biggest concern has gone from 6% in 2003 to 35% today.

Put those together and you get a parent who is deeply involved in the search, 93% of them describing their involvement as moderate to extreme, worried above all about what it costs, and looking to the degree for what it will do for their child's employment. Those last two are the questions institutional marketing tends to handle least directly.

Why is your communication not landing?

Because it does not help them decide.

In the same survey, 71% of parents said they wanted to hear directly from institutions, and 56% felt the frequency of contact was about right. Then 69% said the information they received was not very or not at all useful.

They want to hear from you, they think the volume is about right, and then what arrives fails to help them decide. This is the rare marketing problem where you do not have to fight for attention or budget, because you already have the audience and the send schedule. What you have is a content problem, and content problems are cheap to fix relative to almost anything else on your plan.

What would make it useful?

Answer the questions in the order parents rank them, starting with the one you have been burying.

Publish a net price, not a sticker price, with a worked example for a family at a typical income. Publish what graduates of the specific program earn, or say plainly that you do not track it. Where a trades pathway is the honest better answer for a particular student, say so - the family is already having that conversation and pretending otherwise costs you credibility you will need later.

Then answer the comparison head-on somewhere a person can find it. Most institutional websites do not acknowledge that skilled trades exist as an alternative, which reads as either unawareness or avoidance, and neither is a good look to a parent who has read the federal announcement.

I would flag one limit here. EAB surveyed parents in the United States, so the rankings may sit differently in a Canadian market with lower sticker prices and different aid mechanics. The direction of the finding - that parents are deeply involved, cost-first, and underserved by what institutions send them - matches what recruitment teams here describe, but I would want your own data before rebuilding a plan on the percentages.

What would I do first?

Take the last ten pieces of parent-facing communication you sent and read them as a parent whose main worry is what this will cost. Mark each one useful or not useful. Most teams find the ratio uncomfortable, and it takes an hour.

Then look at your program pages and count how many state a price a family could plan around.

Most institutional positioning was written for a market where the only rival was another university. It needs rebuilding before it needs a campaign. That is what my Brand Repositioning engagement does.