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Category: Data

Why Are We Applauding Statscan’s Lack of Strategic Focus?

Remember about twenty months ago when everyone was gaga over the idea that the feds were going to pay for an expanded version of the faculty survey? And there would be data on part-timers!  And on equity criteria!   And maybe community colleges too! Of course it was never clear that this would achieve anything like what its supporters claimed (mainly because it’s not clear how many profs are prepared to have certain personal data on things like race and disability recorded by

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March 13, 2018 2 Comments

A Suspect Report About Precarity

About a month ago, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives put out a report on precarious employment in Ontario universities and colleges. One good thing about this document at the outset: it has an imaginative research design.  There is so much we do not know, and in the absence of any detailed reporting by institutions themselves cannot know about employment in post-secondary institutions.  To get around this, the report’s authors, Erika Shaker and Robin Shaban, gather data from the Labour Force Survey,

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March 12, 2018 1 Comment

Destinations of Doctoral Graduates

Canada usually alternates between good news and bad news when it comes to higher education data.  Good news: we’re getting marginally better data on profs, for only $1 million per year.  Bad news: we have literally no data on students beyond registration data anymore (social/economic background, anyone?), and no one seems to care. But away from Statscan, we are starting to see a new culture around data which I think is quite heartening: institutions choosing to be more transparent about

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February 12, 2018 1 Comment

The Advance of Online Education in Canada

There was a time – six years or so ago now – when people were talking about the death of universities and the rise of MOOCs. (A collection of my previous posts on MOOCs can be found here).  Among the many, many things this debate obscured was the fact that education delivered online was almost as old as the internet itself. Online education was mature, not some newfangled idea (in the Silicon Valley version of history, everything not invented in

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January 31, 2018 4 Comments

Ideal Academic Workloads

So, I got a bit of mail last week in response to my analysis of the COU data (as I usually do whenever I’m presenting data on academic loads) to the effect that I am being overly reductionist about the teaching loads and perhaps implying that profs aren’t working hard.  Generally speaking, these comments come in two varieties and I will take the time to answer each of them. The first line of critique has to do with unit of

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January 30, 2018 5 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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