Alex Usher is the president of Higher Education Strategy Associates.

For the past couple of years, one of the things that both the Canadian right and left have agreed on is that the transmission belt from higher education to the labour market is broken. For the right, this has been expressed in terms of "skills gaps" (or, when that proved a stretch, "skills mismatches"), which is code for "we need fewer BAs and more college grads." For the left, the discussion has turned on the theme of a "lost" or "squeezed" generation that is highly skilled but is having its transition to the labour market blocked by government austerity, temporary foreign workers, etc.

Uniting these narratives was not just a belief that this state of affairs was a "new normal" that required massive institutional change, but also a near-total reliance on anecdote rather than data. But on Friday, some data showed up. Very quietly, Statistics Canada released the first data from the new National Graduates' Survey. To put it mildly, this new data blows both of those narratives out of the water.

The NGS is designed to report on the fate of graduates two years after graduation. What was released last week was the 2012 employment and income situation of students who graduated in 2010. It's particularly instructive to compare this data with the survey's 2005-07 data, since one was conducted in the midst of a boom and the other in the midst of what feels like a never-ending period of stagnation.

And what do we find when we make these comparisons? Well, first, among graduates who did not pursue further educational credentials (that is, who went into the workforce), employment rates for both bachelor's and college grads in 2012 were exactly the same as they were in 2007.

Remarkably, from the height of the boom to the middle of the current "recession," there's essentially no difference either in terms of overall employment or in terms of full-time employment. To the extent that there are people struggling and having a hard time finding a job, it's business as usual: the proportion has not changed since the height of the boom (for both college and university grads, the unemployment rate in both periods was 5 per cent, with another 5 per cent not in the labour force).