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Category: Data

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

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
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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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