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Category: Canada

Non-existent Preconditions for DARPA Success

The federal government is taking its sweet time being sworn in (apparently the GG is on holiday in Germany or something), so it’ll be another week or so before we get new ministers and new mandate letters.  These letters set ministers’ priorities in a more formal way than manifesto commitments.  My absolute dearest wish, when it comes to Science and Innovation, is that these letters should read “you should take our mandate commitments seriously but not literally”.  That is, the

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October 13, 2021 1 Comment

Canada: Not Quite as Good as It Looks in OECD Comparisons

On Monday, Statscan put out a “Portrait of Youth and Education in Canada,” which includes the following graph accompanied by a note to the effect that Canada has one of the highest post-secondary attainment rates in the world because of our high community colleges/polytechnic participation rates. It was accompanied by the following graph: Figure 1: Highest Level of Educational Attainment, 25 to 34-year-olds, Canada and OECD average 2019, as per Statistics Canada Now, I know this line of argument. I

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October 7, 2021 1 Comment

What Really Happened During COVID? Part 2

Yesterday, we examined student income during COVID.  On aggregate, income might not have dropped at all once the Canada Education Student Benefit is taken into the equation, though there was probably some re-distribution of money away from students who work summers to those who don’t.  Today, I want to look at what happened to institutions in the pandemic, because again the picture painted by the data emerging from institutional financial statements is quite different from the conventional wisdom about what

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October 6, 2021 2 Comments

What Really Happened During COVID? Part 1

I’ve been puzzling over some Statscan data over the last few days, trying to make sense of what happened to the youth labour market during COVID.  And it’s…well, it’s pretty odd.  Not the story you usually hear. Let’s start with what happened to labour market participation.  Figure 1 shows the monthly employment rates for full-time students, comparing the 2020 and 2021 results (at least up to August of this year) to the average of the years 2016 through 2019.  What

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October 5, 2021 No Comments

Inter-provincial Differences in Borrowing and Debt

I recently published some time series data on student debt in Canada, to wit: Figure 1: Average Student Debt at Graduation, Various Sources in constant $2021, Canada, 1982-2021 *indicates data from the Canada University Consortium; otherwise data is from the National Graduates’ Survey As is often the case, national figures obscure provincial differences. So today I wanted to put some data out there to provide those nuanced regional figures. Let’s start with the issue of annual borrowing.  In Figures 2

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October 4, 2021 1 Comment

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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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