One of the weirder sub-fields of student loan policy concerns how loans are accounted for in national budgets and statistics. This sounds like an abstract consideration, but in fact it has the potential to drive student aid and access policy in some very unexpected directions. (I know, I know, this may be my wonkiest post ever, and I may get one or two things wrong because I’m not an accounting expert, so bear with me). For a really good primer
Yesterday I talked about how disappointing/not fit for purpose university and college economic impact statements tend to be. Today I want to talk about how to make them better. Let me start off by rejecting two obvious alternatives. The first is what one might call the “Look! Shiny Things!” school of impact statements, which consists mainly of feeding people exciting anecdotes. For example: “hey look what our one great scientist did!” “Look at our small sample of high-performing alumni did!”
Every once in awhile, universities in Ontario all decide to get on a bandwagon and do the same thing at the same time. This winter, the bandwagon seems to be economic impact statements. I imagine somewhere, Presidents or Provosts through the province came to the conclusion that under a Conservative government, it might be necessary to “prove their worth” in economic terms, and so, lo and behold, a bunch of institutions (as of Friday) have issued identical calls for proposals asking consultants
Last week, Statscan published a paper by Marc Frenette (their best education analyst by a country mile) called Are the Career Prospects of Post-Secondary Graduates Improving? The results are interesting, but unfortunately the paper doesn’t really answer the question in the title. The paper compares the fortunes of two groups of Canadians: those who were 25-34 at the time of the 1991 census and those who were the same age at the time of the 2001 census. It then follows each
The big longread event in this weekend’s papers was, without question, Shannon Gormley’s piece in Macleans on the Thai Cave Rescue (if you haven’t read it yet, stop everything and do so. I’ll be here when you get back. Amazing, right? OK, let’s move on.) Anyways, the second most important longread was the big Globe and Mail feature on Canada’s data gaps, which was actually two pieces, one on data gaps generally and one specifically on Statistics Canada and why the agency is not very good. There was much applause in the
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