Category: Data

One Last Thought (Really) on Administrative Bloat, 2020

NOTE: Please see this blog for a correction to the U of T numbers. (I promise this is the last one.) Here is the graph from yesterday and last Wednesday, on academic and non-academic staff numbers, only this time with UBC included because the folks there kindly sent me their numbers. Figure 1: Percentage Growth in Academic vs. A&S Staff numbers, Self-Selected Institutions Which Publish Staffing Data, 2010 to most recent year available              Yesterday, I pointed out that this

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New Enrolment Data. 2017-18. Finally.

Morning all.  There is finally enrolment data from October 2017 for the 2017-18 year.  Praise be StatsCan.  (Some of you think I am a bit hard on the people from Tunney’s Pasture.  Let’s be clear: much of the reason it takes StatsCan so long to put data together is because it takes institutions – particularly community colleges – a long time to compile and submit the data.  My understanding is that part of the reason this year’s release is a couple of years late

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Administrative Bloat, 2020, Part II

After publishing yesterday’s piece, in which I updated a 5-year-old data analysis on spending on academic vs. non-academic salaries, I got a burst of unwarranted optimism and decided to try to do the same thing with another five year-old analysis on the same topic using institutional data – or at least institutional data from the dozen or so institutions who bother to publish this stuff.  Sounds simple, right?  I mean, if they published data before, they must publish it now, right?  How tough

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Administrative Bloat, 2020 Edition

Let’s take a look at administrative bloat.  It’s been about four and a half years since we last did it: time for another look. Now, the typical story we hear about administrative bloat concerns the huge numbers of administrative and support staff (henceforth, “A&S Staff”) hired, in contrast to the ranks of the professoriate, which are constantly decimated by predatory managers and yadda yadda.  The second part of that is reasonably easy to de-bunk, as Statistics Canada actually publishes data

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New Data on Labour Market Outcomes

A couple of weeks ago, the Labour Market Information Council released a whack of material, produced by Ross Finnie and his Education Policy Research Initiative, on graduate labour market outcomes using Statistics Canada’s new Education and Labour Market Longitudinal Platform (ELMLP).  The material included a paper, a couple of briefs on earnings by gender and international students, and a nifty online widget that lets you play with the data yourself. The data contains a few surprises, though nothing that radically shakes up much of what

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