Degree in medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine or optometry of person

Status: This standard was approved as a departmental standard on April 7, 2016.

Definition

Degree in medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine or optometry refers to whether or not a person has completed a degree in medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine or optometry.

Person refers to an individual and is the unit of analysis for most social statistics programs.

Usage

This variable complements the Educational attainment variable by providing additional estimates of all persons who have obtained medical, dentistry, veterinary medicine or optometry degrees. For those with such a degree, this variable also indicates whether higher educational qualifications (i.e., master's degree or earned doctorate) are held or not. Thus, this variable provides a more complete measure of the population with these qualifications in Canada.

Conformity to relevant internationally recognized standards

This standard does not conform with any of the ISCED levels provided in the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) 2011, published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics. ISCED classifies highly specialized professional studies including "degrees in medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine or optometry" at the Master's level (ISCED 2011, p. 56, paragraph 247), while this standard classifies them at the Bachelor's level. Also, degrees in law and pharmacy are not included in this standard, but ISCED also classifies them as Master's. Within the context of ISCED, a medical, dentistry, veterinary, or optometry degree is the official confirmation, usually in the form of a document certifying the successful completion of an education program or a stage of a program. Qualifications can be obtained through: i) successful completion of a full education program, or ii) successful completion of a stage of an education program (intermediate qualifications).

ISCED classifies educational programs and includes a classification of the levels of educational attainment. This standard does not use ISCED levels but, rather, classifications that reflect the language used to describe education levels in Canada.

Classifications

Relation to previous version

  • Degree in medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine or optometry of person April 07, 2016 to current

    This is the current standard.

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