Category: Data

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

Read More »

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,

Read More »

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

Read More »

More on Measuring Social Mobility

There have been some interesting recent developments with respect to measuring the contribution that universities make to social mobility.  Not in Canada of course – that would require caring about education outcomes or having any capacity for measuring and reporting data on socio-economic mobility – but rather in the UK and the US.  Let me take you on a quick tour of what’s going on and what is being learned. Back in 2017, the John Bates Clark-award-winning economist Raj Chetty

Read More »

Examining Learning Experiences During COVID

Written in collaboration with Michael Sullivan Good morning, all.  Today’s blog is a collaboration with my colleague Michael Sullivan at the Strategic Counsel (with whom we at HESA Towers have been doing some joint projects over the past year or so) and it’s about the results of a new recently completed survey, which looks at students’ learning experiences since the start of this academic year.  It’s an interesting half-full half-empty story, but with some very important future implications. Figure 1

Read More »