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Category: Data

The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, 2026

Morning all. The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada 2026 is out today, and you can download it here. Sincere thanks to our partners at Studiosity, Riipen, Pearson, Duolingo, Intellectual Property Ontario and Westcliff University for helping to produce this year’s version and keep it free for everyone to use. Anything you want to know about Canadian post-secondary education should be in here – but if it’s not, email us and tell us what you think we should add next

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September 9, 2026 No Comments

China Update 2026

Hi all. Every couple of years I spend some time going through data on Chinese higher education and, in particular, the finances of the country’s top universities. It’s been two years since the last time I did this, so here goes: Figure 1 shows total expenditures at what I call China’s Big 8 universities (which is actually just the elite C9 League of universities minus the Harbin Institute of Technology, which does not make previous years’ financial data available), in

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May 25, 2026 No Comments

First-Generation Students, Graduate Migration, and AI’s Effect on the Labour Market

The above is a banger of a title but, unfortunately, I am not weaving those three topics into a single master narrative. Rather, today I’d like to catch everyone up on some Statistics Canada releases from the last couple of weeks which I think deserve wider attention. Canadian First-Generation Students Fare Pretty Well. First up is a paper by Landry Kuate, Amélie Lafrance-Cooke, and Jenny Watt entitled The educational pathways of first-generation students. “First generation” students – that is, students

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March 9, 2026 No Comments

Application Frustration

It’s application season. Time used to be, I could give y’all some really good insight into application trends by using data from the Ontario University Application Centre as I did here, in 2018.  And here, in 2021. All thanks to a modicum of data transparency Until three years ago, OUAC was pretty good about providing data on applicants. It would tell you about applicant numbers, it would tell you about first-choice applications, and it would tell you about total applications.

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February 2, 2026 No Comments

New Statscan Data on Students and Academic Staff

Over the last few weeks – while I have been busy obsessing about Year in Review 2025 – a couple of big Statscan releases came out. One was about students in 2023/2024 and one was about academic staff in 2024/25. Time to catch up. The student data is the slightly more interesting of the two, because it (finally) shows the system essentially at the height of the international student boom in the late fall of 2023 (Statscan student data is

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December 8, 2025 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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