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Category: Data

2018/19 Enrolment Data

Last Thursday was that frabjous day which every higher education nerd has pencilled into their calendar: where Statscan publishes post-secondary enrolment data and for one brief moment we go from having enrolment data which is 37 months out of date to a mere 25 months out of date.  Now, the big picture will be familiar to everyone who read The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, because I already went and got most of this data from institutional websites, but the

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December 1, 2020 1 Comment

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

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.

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