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Category: Data

Institutional Economic Impact Statements Part 2

Yesterday, we looked at how Economic Impact Statements are put together.  Today, we want to look at the uses and misuses of these statements. Let’s start by acknowledging that these statements are not primarily designed to be objective, academic analyses of impact.  Rather, they are political documents, meant to put an institution in a good light.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but it means that they need to be read with a certain eye.  Given the built-in incentive to exaggerate

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November 18, 2020 1 Comment

Institutional Economic Impact Statements: The Basics

For all sorts of reasons, higher education institutions find the need to “show value”.  One of the ways they do this is through economic impact statements.  My HESA Towers colleague Michael Savage has been doing a review of these across Canada and in a couple of other countries and has come up with a really simple framework for thinking about them. Today and tomorrow we’ll be taking an in-depth look at what these documents can and cannot actually explain. Ready? 

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November 17, 2020 1 Comment

New Student Debt Data

Over the summer, Statistics Canada did a data dump on student debt from the 2015 National Graduate Survey.  I haven’t really had a chance to dive into it until now, but here’s a quick round-up. Let’s start with the proportion of students who are borrowing (see Figure 1).  Rates of borrowing vary quite a bit by level of education: lowest at the doctoral level and highest in professional programs such as law and medicine.  Neither is surprising: professional programs have

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November 5, 2020 No Comments

So How are Enrolments Looking, Anyway?

Back in the spring, there was widespread panic that postsecondary enrolments – particularly international enrolments – would crumble if students had to spend a whole term online.  What do we know about how this has turned out this fall? Well, in other countries, this is a relatively straightforward question to answer.  In the UK, national data on new university acceptances are published right around the time students go back to school.  This probably overstates enrolments (not everyone who is accepted

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November 2, 2020 1 Comment

Measuring Internationalization

One maddening thing about universities is that so much of what they claim to value is so badly measured.  Take internationalization.  Usually, this gets measured by the number or proportion of international students, which is ludicrously reductive given the extent to which in many countries international students are primarily income sources; occasionally, you might get some information about the number of foreign faculty.  Maybe.  But that’s it.  Anything deeper on internationalization is usually judged to be unmeasurable, so there is no way

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October 19, 2020 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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