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Category: Data

Fun with Ontario Application Data

Every year or two, it’s fun to play with Ontario applications data (it would be fun to play with applications data from the rest of the country, too, but Ontario is the only place that actually aggregates it, so hold your hot-takes on upper-Canada-centricness).  And, it turns out, there are a lot of quite interesting stories. Let’s start with the programs of study.  The Ontario University Applications Centre modified its program categories a couple of years ago, so to look

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April 17, 2019 6 Comments

Graduate Outcomes Data: Light at the End of the Tunnel?

For the last few years, I have been remarking on how long it is taking for graduate incomes to bounce back after the recession of the late 2000s.  Well, now there seems to be some evidence that things are finally heading back towards their pre-recession norms.  I am looking at Ontario data only (as I do every year), but Ontario contributes almost half of all university graduates in the country, so this is a pretty good proxy for national numbers. 

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March 25, 2019 No Comments

A Flawed Report on Sexual Violence

You may remember a couple of years ago I expressed some concern about the structure of a survey on sexual harassment and sexual violence being designed by the Ministry of Training Colleges and University in Ontario.  In particular, I was concerned that by trying to go for a census rather than a sample, they would in fact get lower overall data quality (why do a census of a superficial quant survey when you could cut costs by sampling and use

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March 22, 2019 2 Comments

Costing Loans

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

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February 7, 2019 No Comments

Better Economic Impact Statements

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!” 

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February 5, 2019 3 Comments
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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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