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Category: Canada

Counting Students

Today’s blog is a nerdy one, prompted by a question from a client: “how many post-secondary students are there in Canada”?  If thinking about how Canadian governments measure the size of the student body isn’t your thing, feel free to skip today.  Let’s start by thinking about who reports student numbers.  Institutions all have a good idea of how many students they have at any given moment, basically because they need to know who has paid  (this sounds cynical, but

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October 25, 2022 No Comments

Health Spending

Y’all are used to me playing around with financial data in the post-secondary sector.  Today, I want to play around a bit with data on cost escalation in the health sector, just so you all can see what the heck the post-secondary sector is up against when it comes to budget discussions in provincial cabinets. Let’s start with Figure 1, which shows provincial spending on health and post-secondary education since 2002.  Turns out that in the 2000s, post-secondary education was

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October 11, 2022 No Comments

Fun With Apprenticeship Registration Data

Last week we looked at undergraduate enrolment. Today, I want to look at a slightly more complicated story; namely, changes over time in apprenticeship enrolments. Figure 1 shows a well-known story about apprenticeships.  This country had a long construction boom starting just before the turn of the century driven in large part by the super-cycle in commodities prices (mainly oil and gas) through to the first half of last decade.  Then, as we all know, oil prices fell, meaning that

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September 26, 2022 No Comments

Evaluating the Superclusters

Yes, this again.  Why?  Because a few weeks ago the feds released an economic analysis of the benefits of Innovation Superclusters (recently rebranded as Global Innovation Clusters to make them sound slightly less ridiculous).  It’s horrible analysis, but since this topic unites my twin pastimes of making fun of crap economic impact analysis and crap pseudo-industrial policy, I could not resist.   Some background: early in the Liberals’ first term, they announced that the key to growth was clusters – that

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September 19, 2022 1 Comment

Saskatchewan in a Nutshell

We have almost come to the end of the nutshell series.  In this, the final installment, we will look at Saskatchewan, which when you think of it is kind of to the other provinces what Canada is to the rest of the world.  The quintessence of Canada, if you will. Taking Saskatchewan last is partly a function of data problems in the province.  As in several other provinces, college numbers are subject to a sudden surge in the late aughts,

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September 14, 2022 2 Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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