Category: Data

Counting the Previously Uncounted

Morning all.  No podcast today: we had some scheduling difficulties that require us to switch up Monday’s blog to today, and the interview on Saudi Arabia with Annalisa Pavan to Monday.  Our apologies. Earlier this week, the good folks at Statscan released i) a pretty cool infographic about students in private post-secondary education in Canada and ii) a remarkably nerdy piece, technically a report on a “pilot project,” about how they came up with the numbers in the infographic.  Strangely, it didn’t publish

Read More »

The World’s Rising Scientific Research Nations

I was sitting at home this weekend, reading the UNESCO World Science Report (2021), as one does, when I started poking around with the actual bibliometric numbers.  And damned if there weren’t some big surprises in there.  First: what is the UNESCO World Science Report?  Well, it’s a pretty interesting document which has appeared periodically since 1993.  Over time, the document has become longer and more complicated.  And for the last few editions, it has produced some statistical annexes examining

Read More »

Three Unrelated Stories

Sometimes I need a mental break from writing a few hundred words on one topic.  So, today, here’s a few hundred words on three separate topics. 1) The Sexuality Gap.  A few years ago, Statistics Canada threw a question on sexual orientation into the Canadian Community Health Survey.   What this meant was that we suddenly got a lot of demographic data on the country’s LGBTQ+ population, including the finding – published in Ethnocultural diversity among lesbian, gay and bisexual cultures

Read More »

Final Thoughts on Historical Higher Ed Finances

After three blog posts looking at historical data on financing (see here, here and here), I thought I should do one final one which tries to tease out some lessons.  Let’s focus on what I think are the key graphs from yesterday: Figure 1: Total Institutional Income per FTE Student by Source, Canadian Universities, 1962-63 to 2020-21, in constant $2022 Figure 2: Total Institutional Income per Full-Time Student by Source, Canadian Colleges, 1976-77 to 2020-21, in constant $2022 Figure 3:

Read More »

Historical Higher Education Data-Palooza Part 3

So it seems a lot of you were pretty interested in last week’s data fest and in particular this graph (of which I am inordinately proud, ‘cos damn it took some work). Figure 1: Total Government Transfers to Institutions by Source and Type, Canada, 1955-56 to 2020-21, in millions of $2022. The big story here is that institutional income in post-secondary education has grown much faster from 1999 onwards than it did at any time in the preceding 30 years. 

Read More »