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Category: Data

The Canadian Professoriate: The Long View

Recently, I noticed that Statistics Canada has data on the Canadian professoriate dating back to 1970-71.  I don’t know if this is a recent addition to the free data scheme or if it’s been there all along and I have never noticed it, but it’s certainly worth a peek. Figure 1 is the simple picture, just total numbers.  It’s a pretty simple story: long-term, Canadian higher education has expanded by about 460 full-time academics per year every year since 1970. 

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January 12, 2022 1 Comment

Faculty Salary Data, 2020-21

We haven’t looked at faculty salaries in awhile, so let’s do that. Getting a handle on recent faculty salary data is easy: it’s the one thing that Statscan does both rapidly and well in the higher education field.  It may take them 30 months to produce student enrolment data, and they collect no data at all about college tuition or non-academic staff, but by gum they can process university salary data in under 12 months! (Yes, this does tell you

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January 11, 2022 1 Comment

Funny Math in Alberta

Many of my Canadian readers will likely have read a piece that has been circulating on the internet from Kim Siever, a self-described leftist internet journalist from Lethbridge.  The headline says it all: UCP Government to Cut Post-Secondary Spending by $1.5 Billion; That Number Rises to $3.5 Billion if you Factor in Inflation and Population Growth.  You know how I am always on about Economic Impact Analyses always being forms of competitive counting? Methodologically speaking, this is worse. Ok, so here’s

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December 1, 2021 No Comments

StatsCan Enrolment Day 2021

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

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November 29, 2021 1 Comment

Overqualification

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

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November 18, 2021 2 Comments
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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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