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Category: Data

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

A More Nuanced Look at Graduate Incomes

It’s all-Council-of-Ontario-Universities this week on the blog, but that’s because they’re the ones putting out the great data.  Today, it’s the annual survey on graduate outcomes which looks at how bachelor’s degree graduates are faring in the labour market.  Standard caveat: Ontario =/= Canada, but it produces nearly half the country’s bachelor degrees so it’s bound to be close to the national average and the trends you see here are unlikely to be much different that those you see anywhere else. Figure 1 shows

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January 25, 2018 No Comments

Mind-blowing Ontario Academic Staffing Data (Part 2)

Today I want to go back to that COU report on academic staff I described yesterday (mind-blowing because of how much previously unavailable data it provided) and pick up on the other set of issues it raised: namely, the status of part-time and non-tenure track staff (ie. sessionals). The data is not perfect, but it is by several orders of magnitude the best thing ever published on the subject.  So here goes. The report makes a distinction between tenure stream

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January 24, 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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