The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Data

Bring Back the Transparency Debate

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

Read More »
November 15, 2021 1 Comment

Labour Scarcity and Higher Education

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

Read More »
November 8, 2021 2 Comments

Affordability, 2021

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

Read More »
November 1, 2021 1 Comment

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

Read More »
October 14, 2021 1 Comment

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

Read More »
October 7, 2021 1 Comment
Load More

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...