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Category: Data

Bad Data on Brain Drain

Periodically, in Canada, someone comes up with a statistic about higher education.  Doesn’t matter if it makes the least bit of sense – as long as it serves somebody’s political narrative.  This statistic can go ON and ON unchallenged for years unless someone steps on it quickly (and I should know: I came up with a doozy about a decade ago). Yesterday, one such statistic popped up and it’s so juicy you just know it’s going to used constantly even though

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May 4, 2018 No Comments

(Another) New Report on Skills

Late last week the Business Higher Education Roundtable published the results of a survey of its members (big Canadian businesses) on the issue of skills.  The results were…intriguing. Let’s start with the classic question: are there skills shortages?  Here’s what respondents said. Figure 1: To What Degree are Skill Shortages an Issue for your Sector/Company? Yes, there are skills shortages, but a) not many think they are that significant, and big business thinks they’re better insulated than other companies in

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April 10, 2018 1 Comment

Enrolment Trends in Rural/Remote Community Colleges

For giggles, every once in awhile I start looking at institutional enrolment data.  This weekend, I started looking specifically at community colleges.  I noted back here that enrolment in colleges nationally has been pretty flat for the last five years, but that’s a national picture only.  Start drilling down to the level of individual institutions, and things start getting pretty interesting. For the most part, it’s not hard to find data on individual college enrolments over time, even without paying extortionate fees

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April 3, 2018 3 Comments

Never Let Facts Get in the Way of a Good Story

Just as I finish writing about the huge boom in STEM enrolments, along comes the Financial Post’s Diane Francis with a dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers op-ed effectively arguing that international students are stealing all the spots in Science and Engineering. She contends that Canadian university STEM programs should only be for Canadian students because foreign students all return home and this leaves us defenceless in a world of massive technological change.  This article is such a grab-bag of bad arguments I decided to answer it immediately; the

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March 20, 2018 1 Comment

The Great STEM-Arts Reversal

It’s always good, once in awhile, to check up on application statistics, just to check up on demand for education.  Ontario, thank God, has a system that allows you to look at applications system-wide.  A few years ago, everyone was panicking about falling application numbers because of a five percent fall in 2013-2015, mostly caused by a significant fall in the number of 18 year-olds. So how have things been since then?  Well, it turns out that application numbers have stabilized.  In

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March 14, 2018 2 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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