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Category: Data

International Women’s Day 2023

Today is a statistical overview for International Women’s Day. Let’s start by looking at student numbers.  Figure 1 gives us the long view on female participation in universities (sorry college folks: Statscan data for your sector is a mess prior to the 1990s).  Women represented about 20% of university students from the 1920s to the mid-1950s, apart from the years during World War 2.  Starting around 1955, women’s share of total enrolments began a steady climb.  By 1989, women passed

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March 8, 2023 No Comments

Three Takes on the Latest Ontario Universities Applications Data

The Ontario High School Application numbers dropped last week, and I thought it would be worth a quick tour of the data.  Two things first: First: I know folks from outside Ontario get cheesed off about the way I keep banging on about Ontario numbers, but here’s the thing: the rest of y’all don’t publish your data.  I cannot write about hidden data: sorry. Second: speaking of hidden data, the Ontario Universities Application Centre, for extremely flimsy reasons, has stopped

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January 26, 2023 No Comments

New Data on Completion Rates

For the last few years, Statscan has been publishing cohort completion data using the Post-Secondary Student Information System (PSIS).  A new round of data dropped last week, and there were several interesting nuggets for anyone who cared to dive in a little bit behind the headline numbers.  Let’s dive in, shall we? Let’s begin with university undergraduate degrees.  Figure 1 shows the 6-year completion rate for undergraduate degrees in Canada (note, completion here refers to completion of the degree-level in

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January 19, 2023 No Comments

A First Look At 2021 Education Census Data

Last Thursday, the only national statistics agency we’ve got released a batch of data from the 2021 census relating to education.  There is some interesting stuff in there, particularly with respect to the relationship between education and occupation.  I can’t get into all of it here – seems like the kind of thing I could spend most of the holidays fooling around on – but I want to dig into a couple of key pieces of data. Before I get

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December 5, 2022 1 Comment

Data Priorities

You all know I complain a lot about data in Canada.  So today, I thought I’d assemble a wish list: a set of priorities for developing a better system of higher education data, along with some thoughts about how these measures could be implemented as part of a larger, overall accountability agenda Now, I am going to focus on the need for new data but there is a lot that could be done to make better use of existing data. 

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November 29, 2022 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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