Educational Atainment and Literacy Levels - Seniors

Seniors have, on average, relatively low levels of formal educational training. For example, only 8% of all Canadians aged 65 and over had a university degree in 1996, compared with 17% of people between the ages of 25 and 64. Seniors were also less likely than their younger counterparts to have a certificate or diploma from a non-university post-secondary institution.

In fact, the majority of today's seniors, over six out of ten, never completed high school. Of these, 25% had attended, but had not graduated from high school, while 37% had less than a Grade 9 education.

Partly as a result of their relative lack of formal educational experience, many seniors have difficulty reading written material. Indeed, 53% were only able to perform simple reading tasks, such as locating one piece of information in a text, in an international literacy survey conducted in 1994.

A substantial number of Canadian seniors, however, are currently back in school. In 1996, almost 20,000 were enrolled in some kind of formal educational program. Of these, about a quarter were registered as full-time students, with the remainder enrolled on a part-time basis.