Category: Data

Higher Education Crucible: The Former Eastern Bloc

Today, I want to talk a little bit about a region of the world that doesn’t get a whole lot of attention/respect in higher education talk, but which has recently faced some quite unimaginable financial and demographic challenges.   The higher education systems of the former Soviet Union and its erstwhile Eastern European allies have been through a wild ride over the past fifteen years and there really has never been another period in higher education history with such a rapid

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Canada: Not Quite as Good as It Looks in OECD Comparisons

On Monday, Statscan put out a “Portrait of Youth and Education in Canada,” which includes the following graph accompanied by a note to the effect that Canada has one of the highest post-secondary attainment rates in the world because of our high community colleges/polytechnic participation rates. It was accompanied by the following graph: Figure 1: Highest Level of Educational Attainment, 25 to 34-year-olds, Canada and OECD average 2019, as per Statistics Canada Now, I know this line of argument. I

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Inter-provincial Differences in Borrowing and Debt

I recently published some time series data on student debt in Canada, to wit: Figure 1: Average Student Debt at Graduation, Various Sources in constant $2021, Canada, 1982-2021 *indicates data from the Canada University Consortium; otherwise data is from the National Graduates’ Survey As is often the case, national figures obscure provincial differences. So today I wanted to put some data out there to provide those nuanced regional figures. Let’s start with the issue of annual borrowing.  In Figures 2

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20 Years of Data on Canadian Undergraduate Students – Part 1

Co-authored with Tiffany MacLennan Last week, I examined undergraduate student debt using data from the triennial survey of graduating students undertaken by the Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC).  Today and tomorrow, along with Tiffany MacLennan (one of HESA’s many rockstar analysts), I am going to put that same data source to use to look at other aspects of university financing. So, just to remind everyone: CUSC is a 20-something year-old coalition of the willing, which is roughly 30-odd institutions who

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