January 2024 - Closing the First Nations Education Gap in

The largest relative gaps between the populations continue to occur in the “no educational credential” category, where the First Nations share is over two times as large as the non-Indigenous share, and the bachelor’s and above bachelor’s categories, where the First Nations share makes up 37% and 26% of the non-Indigenous share, respectively. [...] • The closure of the conditional employment income gap is associated with the smallest economic gains of all the scenarios considered; in 2041, the closure of the gap is associated with an additional $4.7 billion in First Nations GDP. [...] ix Closing the First Nations Education Gap in Canada: Assessing Progress and Estimating the Economic Benefits — An Update Using 2021 Census Data1 Introduction In February of 2023, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) released a study done by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards (CSLS), leveraging data from the 2016 Census to assess the state of the educational attainment gap between First N. [...] It is important to note that there are two effects at play here: the reduction in the share of First Nations people in the category and the reduction in the share of non-Indigenous people in the category. [...] The fact that the size of the gap falls so substantially when we control for educational attainment is a testament to the paramount importance of educational attainment in reducing the employment income gap between the two populations; based on these figures, between 35% and 62% of the aggregate employment income gap is attributable to differences in educational attainment across the two populatio.