Everybody knows that we are facing a critical skills gap today. Our education system produces far too many graduates in arts, humanities and social sciences, and not enough in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). This mismatch has placed a heavy cost on individuals who cannot find jobs and on society at large as industries face shortages and our rate of innovation declines. The problem with this story is that it is largely a myth.

First, a bit of background on the skills gap narrative. People have been worrying for years now that Canada is facing a looming jobs crisis. The fear, probably best exemplified by the report “People without Jobs, Jobs without People,” is that as the baby boomer generation retires there will not be enough people with the right skills to meet the needs of the labour market. This coincided with a general sense that too many students were going off to university to study things like philosophy or art history, without any reasonable prospect of employment.

The solution to this problem was for young people to get serious and study more math and science. A 2013 report by the group Let’s Talk Science lamented that less than 50 per cent of Canadian high school students were taking senior STEM courses. In that same year, the Conference Board of Canada gave our education system a “C” grade when it came to the percentage of graduates we produce in STEM fields.

To help address this urgent problem, government took action. Through its Youth STEM program, the federal government committed millions of dollars to encourage more young people to pursue STEM education and careers. And the Toronto District School Board pledged to substantially increase STEM programming in its schools.

Businesses have stepped up as well. Last fall, Google Canada committed $1.5 million to help increase STEM education in our colleges and universities. And Microsoft Canada has partnered with non-profits to help provide STEM education to young people across the country.

So surely all of this attention and effort is addressing a real problem, isn’t it? Not according to a recent report by the Council of Canadian Academies, which set up an expert panel to study the issue. The panel was chaired by former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge, and consisted of mathematics, engineering and economics professors from across the country. It spent 18 months examining STEM education and the purported skills gap in Canada. It concluded that there was “no evidence of a current imbalance between the demand for and supply of STEM skills” and that “the source of Canada’s productivity problem is not a shortage of advanced STEM skills.”

But how could this be? Well, just look at the data. If we really had a large skills gap, wages in STEM fields would be very high and unemployment would be very low relative to non-STEM fields. But there is almost no evidence of this. In fact, the median salary of science and technology grads is actually lower than those in non-STEM fields, and the unemployment rate in STEM and non-STEM fields is virtually identical. The report therefore concludes that contrary to popular opinion, “Canada appears to have a well-functioning labour market, where individuals are choosing fields of study and occupations based on factors such as market signals and personal preferences.”

That so many people continue to believe in existence of a skills gap, despite the facts, is why Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has dubbed it a “Zombie Idea,” an idea that should be killed by evidence, but refuses to die. Krugman pins the blame on the fact that influential people and the media have kept repeating the skills gap narrative for years now, to the point where it has just become accepted wisdom. He thinks part of the reason for this is to divert attention away from widening income equality and so that workers can be blamed for their own struggles. But while I doubt that is a major motivation among government and business leaders here in Canada, that does not make the skills gap story any more real. So perhaps it is time to put this myth to rest and focus our efforts on more pressing issues.