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Category: Data

Free Tuition Tomfoolery at CCPA

[the_ad id=”11745″] The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) put out its Alternative Federal Budget last month (earlier and much shorter than usual, for reasons I don’t understand).  As has been the case for the last couple of years, the AFB included a “free tuition” program.  Basically, their idea is a conditional transfer to provinces to “eliminate tuition fees in all programs” on condition that provinces “match their share of the cost” and observe some as-of-yet non-existent Canada Post-Secondary Education

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October 3, 2018 2 Comments

The Tightening Labour Market

Yesterday, I took a quick trip back to the early part of the decade for a reminder of how bad the “skills shortage” debate of 5-6 years ago was.  Today, I want to talk a little bit about how we may be heading into something like an actual skills shortage right now, and what the parameters of that shortage look like. The best place to look for evidence on general skills shortages is the Bank of Canada’s quarterly Business Outlook Survey.

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September 19, 2018 No Comments

Bad Data on Sessionals

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) put out a paper on Tuesday entitled Out of the Shadows: Experiences of Contract Academic Staff, which mostly presents data on a survey conducted by the association last year.  While the intentions might have been good, the resulting data – which is already getting lots of media play – needs to be taken with a grain of salt.  And one claim in particular – that the number of sessional faculty has soared by 79% in the

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September 6, 2018 No Comments

Student Debt Not Increasing Whatsoever (Shocker)

Hi all.  How’s the summer working out so far? I promised I would be back with a blog just as soon as the folks at the Canadian Undergraduate Survey Consortium (CUSC) published their triennial survey of graduating students, which is the most regular and arguably the best source of information we have on student debt.  Which they did on June 27, so here I am. (Why is CUSC the best source?  Well, the feds can’t publish such data because CSLP

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June 28, 2018 4 Comments

A Decline in Apprenticeships?

[the_ad id=”12709″] A few years ago, I made the observation that Canada’s big run-up in apprenticeship numbers was highly correlated with the commodity price super-cycle (in particular, the price of oil) and that an era of low energy/commodity prices might lead to a big decrease in demand for apprentices.  Time to check on that prediction. So, first thing to note is that apprentice numbers are down a bit over the last couple of years.  Probably not as much as expected if one

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June 14, 2018 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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