Category: Data

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

Read More »

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

Read More »

Fun With Apprenticeship Registration Data

Last week we looked at undergraduate enrolment. Today, I want to look at a slightly more complicated story; namely, changes over time in apprenticeship enrolments. Figure 1 shows a well-known story about apprenticeships.  This country had a long construction boom starting just before the turn of the century driven in large part by the super-cycle in commodities prices (mainly oil and gas) through to the first half of last decade.  Then, as we all know, oil prices fell, meaning that

Read More »

Fun With University Enrolment Data

Just for kicks, let’s look at undergraduate enrolment data in Canada, shall we?  Figure 1 shows enrolment trends at their very highest level: health and STEM subjects on the one hand and everything else (education, social sciences, business, humanities and fine arts) on the other.  Basically, over the past 30 years or so, STEM and health programs have gone from educating a little over one in four undergraduate students to educating a little over four in ten today.  Non-STEM/health fields

Read More »

Saskatchewan in a Nutshell

We have almost come to the end of the nutshell series.  In this, the final installment, we will look at Saskatchewan, which when you think of it is kind of to the other provinces what Canada is to the rest of the world.  The quintessence of Canada, if you will. Taking Saskatchewan last is partly a function of data problems in the province.  As in several other provinces, college numbers are subject to a sudden surge in the late aughts,

Read More »