Category: Data

Questions About Alberta Data

I’m heading to Alberta for a couple of days this week, so I’ve been looking more carefully at some of what’s going on there, particularly following the MacKinnon Report on government financing.  And frankly, I’m a little perplexed at what I am seeing. Just to be clear, the Albertan government is currently on a kick to balance the budget after several years of deficits.  Nothing wrong with that.  Higher education is one of the areas they have decided is among those they

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Some Good News on Access

One of my favourite reports released last winter was a little gem, written by a team of Ontario researchers and published by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), entitled High School Success and Access to Postsecondary Education. It tells the very good news story that access to post-secondary education is rising quite rapidly in the city of Toronto across all income groups.  The study is interesting because it makes use of the Ontario Education Number to link individual record data

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That Universities Canada Equity Study

Those of you with minds like steel traps may remember that two years ago Universities Canada issued a set of Principles on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.  Not only did they release a set of principles, but also an Action Plan which among other things promised a shiny new survey and “making quantitative data available for benchmarking and comparative analysis”.  Cool, huh? Only if you looked at the fine print (as I noted at the time), the only thing that was going to be

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Intriguing New Data on PSE Access

For reasons that continue to baffle me, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario keeps putting out quite fascinating research papers with almost no fanfare.  Seriously, reading their publications page is the literary equivalent of the sound of a tree falling in an empty forest.  Fabulous, fabulous stuff that somehow appears in conditions of near-absolute secrecy. The latest in the series of obscure diamonds is a piece written by the Social Research and Demonstration Corporation’s Reuben Ford, Taylor Shek-wai Hui

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The Changing Finances of World-Class Universities (part 2)

If you are just joining us, we’re in the middle of a three-day session on the finances of the world’s top-200 universities, or, more specifically, the 147 of them in the US, UK, Australia, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Japan and Canada. Yesterday,  I showed that the top-200 institutions in all these countries were increasing their total expenditures in real terms, albeit at different rates, and that their research funding was also increasing substantially (in fact, faster than general revenues

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