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Category: Canada

An Amazing Statscan Skills Study

I’ve been hard on Statscan lately because of their mostly-inexcusable data collection practices.  But every once in awhile the organization redeems itself.  This week, that redemption takes the form of an Analytical Studies Branch research paper by Marc Frenette and Kristyn Frank entitled Do Postsecondary Graduates Land High-Skilled Jobs?  The implications of this paper are pretty significant, but also nuanced and susceptible to over-interpretation.  So let’s go over in detail what this paper’s about. The key question Frenette & Frank

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January 26, 2017 2 Comments

The Science Policy Review

So, any day now, the report of the Government of Canada’s Science Policy review should be appearing.  What is that, you ask?  Good question. “Science policy” is one of those tricky terms.  Sometimes it can mean science as a way of making policy (like when someone claims they want all policy to be “evidence-based); sometimes it’s about policy for or about Science, and the rules and regulations under which it is funded.  This particular Science policy review, chaired by former U

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January 25, 2017 1 Comment

Budget Fun at the University of Ottawa

Back in early December, the Ottawa Citizen reported on a controversy at the University of Ottawa.  Basically, the story was that the University is facing a $20 million budget shortfall, the administration is consulting re: how to cut its budget and some people are very upset with some of the proposed solutions. Of course, cutbacks anywhere, anytime, are unacceptable to someone in the institution.  The library, for instance, is being asked to contemplate a cut of $2 million).  “A source”

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January 24, 2017 2 Comments

Puzzles in the youth labour market

A couple of days ago, after looking at employment patterns among recent graduate using Ontario graduate survey data, I promised a look at broader youth labour market data. I now wish I hadn’t promised that because Statistics Canada’s CANSIM database is an ungodly mess and has got significantly worse since the last time I tried to use its data. Too little of the data on employment and income allows users to focus in by age *and* education level, and even

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January 20, 2017 1 Comment

More Bleak Data, But This Time on Colleges

Everyone seems to be enjoying data on graduate outcomes, so I thought I’d keep the party going by looking at similar data from Ontario colleges. But first, some of you have written to me suggesting I should throw some caveats on what’s been covered so far. So let me get a few things out of the way. First, I goofed when saying that there was no data on response rates from these surveys. Apparently there is and I just missed

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January 18, 2017 No 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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