Last Wednesday was StatsCan Enrolment Day, 2021. Now, this does not of course mean that we now have data on enrolments for 2021. That won’t happen for another couple of years. No, what it means is that we have data for 2019-20, so we are only about 25 months behind reality instead of the 37 months behind that we were last Tuesday. (StatsCan is capable of faster work. Heck, it can get university tuition fee increases more or less right
Sorry for the late blog appearance: I’ve been bouncing around Alberta and British Columbia for work and play this week (#ICETECA, baby) and it’s tough to write on these terrible little short-haul flights. Anyways, today I want to talk about a paper which came out a few weeks ago called Overqualification among 2012 and 2013 bachelor’s graduates, by Statistics Canada’s Diane Galarneau. “Overqualification” is a fraught topic to define and measure. This study uses a snapshot of bachelor’s graduates a couple
In 1991, Maclean’s began publishing university rankings. In doing so, it relied heavily on university co-operation: in particular, it required institutions to fill in a survey for various pieces of data on admissions, class sizes, etc. Not all the questions were particularly well-defined and so there was a lot of data gaming. Eventually, in 2006, the universities decided they were not going to play the game any more: they were going to get out of the rankings business and instead set up
A few weeks ago, the economist Armine Yalnizyan penned a really good piece for The Star. It examined epoch-defining shift in “developed” economies from a world in which labour is plentiful and capital is in short supply, to one in which capital is plentiful and the competition is for labour. This will have profound effects on higher education, which I don’t think many in the sector have absorbed. The upshot is this: we are going into a period where labour
StatsCan released its annual survey of tuition fees at universities last month (it does not bother to collect similar data with colleges, because reasons). Average domestic undergraduate fees looked like this: Figure 1: Average Undergraduate Tuition, by Province, 2021-22 Only two things to note here. First, Ontario fees keep falling relative to other provinces because of the Ford government’s freeze on tuition (for which, hilariously, it continues to receive no political credit). For most of the past decade, Ontario was
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