Category: Data

Student Well-Being

Note: this article contains references to sexual violence, harassment, and suicide/self-harm. For a couple of decades now, the American College Health Association (ACHA) has been administering a ridiculously long and detailed survey called the National College Health Assessment, which goes under the unwieldy title of ACHA-NCHA.  Since 2013, a number of Canadian institutions have taken part in this as well, which allows for some reasonably interesting comparisons over time. (N.b. since Fall 2019, a new iteration of the survey has

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Counting Students

Today’s blog is a nerdy one, prompted by a question from a client: “how many post-secondary students are there in Canada”?  If thinking about how Canadian governments measure the size of the student body isn’t your thing, feel free to skip today.  Let’s start by thinking about who reports student numbers.  Institutions all have a good idea of how many students they have at any given moment, basically because they need to know who has paid  (this sounds cynical, but

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Education at a Glance 2022

It’s that day of the year, when OECD releases its annual report on education across the world’s richest countries, known as Education at a Glance.  I have written about these releases many times before, and in truth a lot of the data tells the same story, year after year: Canada has very high attainment rates, mainly due to the way we choose to present our data on college students.  We also spend more than most countries on post-secondary education if

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Visible Minority Students and Professorial Time Use

Unfortunately, I’m not here to announce that Canada has overtaken Nigeria or Burkina Faso for the time it takes to release national-level enrolment data (we still lag, sadly).  But the only national statistical agency we have has still managed to put out a couple of interesting pieces of interest to higher education over the last few months.  Together they make a neat little post. Let’s start with the Profile of Canadian graduates at the bachelor level belonging to a group

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Global Higher Education to 2050

Thinking about the future of higher education is my bread and butter.  For the last few months, I have been thinking about the extreme long-term and wondering what it all portends for the shape and function of institutions globally.  I’ll share a little bit of what I have been thinking today. If we take a long view – say back to the 1960s, we see a continual increase in the enrolment of students in higher education (which, for the higher

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