YouTube/Oil and Gas Canada

Young men in Alberta lost their interest in studying when the province's oil sands sectors offered them jobs whose average hourly wage increase of 21 per cent was significantly higher than the 4 per cent salary hike granted to workers in other Canadian provinces.

Data from Statistics Canada said that during the period 2001 to 2008, young men who went to secondary schools went down to 37 per cent from 44 per cent. It was significantly lower than the 53 per cent logged in non-oil producing provinces.

The large compensation packages resulted in the average wage of oil and gas professionals hitting $125,680. But it resulted in lower-wage jobs such as crew of doughnut shop Tim Hortons and McDonald's finding it hard then to fill in vacancies.

And the resource boom and the higher salaries, in turn, pushed up cost of living.

The Statistics Canada study failed to monitor if the young people then who opted for higher wages in oilsands jobs subsequently returned to school in later years.

Frank Atkins, economics professor at the University of Calgary explained, quoted by the Calgary Herald, that "Every boom is followed by a bust, and then the bust comes, people leave the oilpatch and go back to whatever they were doing - be it school or whatever job they had before that. It's a natural phenomenon, people are just chasing the highest (wage) bracket."