Category: Data

Education at a Glance 2021

On Thursday, the OECD released its annual Education at a Glance report.  I always do a blog post about these, even though, let’s face it, very little changes annually.  But I have zero desire to talk about this godforsaken election anymore, so this seems like a welcome opportunity to change the subject a bit. Let’s start with Figure 1, tertiary attainment rates, where Canada always performs well.  This shows Canada as having one of the highest tertiary attainment rates in

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Student Debt Update 2021

Back in early July, the Canadian Undergraduate Survey Consortium (CUSC) released its triennial survey of graduating students.  As always, one of the most interesting things in there is the data on student debt, because it is one of the few good, up-to-date national snapshots that we have of the issue.  There are some limitations to the snapshot.  It doesn’t report out on a provincial basis, only a national one.  It doesn’t really include Quebec.  The sample in the survey is

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Inter-provincial Student Mobility

We talk a lot about international student mobility in Canada.  But what about inter-provincial student mobility?  Let’s go find out. In 2018-19, the last year for which data is available, the proportion of Canadian undergraduates who were studying in another province was about 8.4%.  As Figure 1 shows, this proportion has been increasing very slowly for the last thirty years (the precipitous drop in 1996-97 has to do with Quebec universities not reporting data in that year, something which I am pretty

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Back to 2038

Judging by the feedback on yesterday’s blog, y’all are pretty interested in demography (One Thought followers are the best followers. How great is it that my most popular blogs are about demography?).   So, I thought I would follow up on the three biggest threads of questions and commentary which have flooded my inbox and blog comments over the last 24 hours. First: where did I get the data?  Well, that one’s easy.  Statistics Canada does projections every few years,

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Globe Data Wrongness

On Saturday, the Globe and Mail ran a major story about the gender gap in pay at Ontario universities by Chen Wang and Robyn Doolittle.  On the whole, I thought the piece was accurate concerning the politics of equity inside the academy.  But one of the conclusions was that there is “steadily growing” gender wage gap at universities and this is codswallop, born of some seriously suspect data analysis.  Consider the blog my way of correcting the record. Wang and Doolittle’s data

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