Foreign credential recognition: My grandfather’s story
PhD student Kaya M. Anderson uses her grandfather’s 1974 Ontario credential letter to examine how Canada undervalues the qualifications of internationally educated immigrants.
When Kaya M. Anderson, a Western PhD student, told her grandfather she had been accepted into a PhD program, he brought out a black briefcase holding a 1974 letter from Ontario’s Ministry of Education. It said his Philippine degree in radio and electronics engineering was equivalent only to Ontario’s Grade 13. He kept it for more than 50 years. Her essay first ran in The Conversation.
He immigrated in 1973 and her grandmother, a nurse, followed. Retraining as an engineer would have taken too long and cost too much, so he worked nearly 50 years as an electrician. She worked 32 years as a registered nurse in Toronto hospitals.
Anderson draws on philosopher Miranda Fricker’s idea of epistemic injustice to describe how his expertise went unrecognized. In 2021, recent immigrants were more than twice as likely as young Canadian-born workers to be over-educated for their jobs, and rates were highest, at 54.7 per cent, among immigrants from Southeast Asia.
She urges debates to remember the people behind immigration statistics.
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