The real problem Canada has with respect to the whole “does-education-pay” debate is data. It’s not that we don’t have people collecting data – we do, lots of them. The problem is that they’re all collecting data over time frames so short as to be largely meaningless.

The gold standard used to be the National Graduate Survey, which surveyed every fifth graduating class two and five years out. Now the 2-year survey is a year behind schedule and the 5-year follow-up has been discontinued. That’s right, folks – at the start of the recession, when Statscan took a look at their suite of surveys and decided which ones to can and which ones to keep, they decided that the one on medium-term educational outcomes was among the least policy-relevant and canned it. You know, so they could keep funding their monthly poultry storage reports .

For about a decade now, a number of provinces (all except MB, SK and NL) have started collecting data too; indeed, they have been doing so on a biannual basis, which is much better than Statscan could ever manage. However, most only track them out to 24 months, so the issue of long-term outcomes is still unaddressed. BC is the only province which does 5-year reports, and they’re quite interesting (more about them tomorrow).

The long-term outcomes of degrees and programs clearly matter a great deal. So why can’t we measure them? Cost, mainly. Anything further out that about 24 months is expensive to do well (BC’s 5-year response rates are disappointing, for instance), and so – penny-wise pound-foolish nation that we are – we don’t do it.

But there actually is a very cost-effective way to do this; namely, to link student records to tax records. Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas have already linked their grads’ data to unemployment records and others seem poised to follow. In Canada, we could quite easily do the same thing by having Statistics Canada link its Post-Secondary Student Information System (PSIS) to the T1 family file. Instantly, with no new data collection expenses, you’d have income data by institution, program of study – what have you – as many years out as you like. As always with Big Data, there are some privacy concerns, but frankly none of them are very convincing, certainly not compared with the major public policy gains available.

Linking administrative databases is cheaper, faster and more accurate than what we do now. Why we haven’t moved to this system already is one of the biggest mysteries in Canadian higher education policy.