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Category: Data

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

Canadian University Income, 2018-19

This year’s regular data release from the Financial Information of Universities and Colleges was delayed by about three months this year due to the pandemic, but it was released late last week. (This data does not actually include community colleges – that’s a separate survey that doesn’t get published for another few months, so sorry in advance for the university-centric material) As usual, I have a two-parter today and tomorrow to discuss the results, one on income and one on expenditure. 

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October 13, 2020 No Comments

OECD Education at a Glance 2020

The OECD released its Education at a Glance (you can download yesterday’s release here), and every year at this time I do a report on the release (see previous articles from 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019).  Mostly my précises focus on the same couple of things, to wit: Canada has among the highest rates of higher education participation in the world, mainly because our college/polytechnic system is bigger and richer than that of any other country. Whether you measure expenditures on a per-student basis or on a %

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September 9, 2020 No Comments

Are the Kids All Right?

One of the best – and yet perhaps most confusing – ways to look at the current state of today’s students is to look at the Canadian version of the National College Health Assessment (NCHA) survey, which is done every three years.  I want to take you through a quick comparison of the 2013 and 2019 surveys (each of which were taken by tens of thousands of Canadian students, so it’s a good sample), because I think there is a

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September 3, 2020 1 Comment

New Student Aid Data

Canada is – to put it mildly – flat-out terrible at releasing student aid data.  How many loans are issued?  How many grants?  In what amounts?  These rather basic facts are unknowable from the public record.  The government of Canada publishes statistics on the Canada Student Loans Program, which is good except that a) that’s only about 40% of the system and b) the most recent publication is from – and I wish I were kidding about this – 2016-17. 

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September 2, 2020 1 Comment

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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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