The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Data

Student Numbers

[the_ad id=”11819″] In December, Statistics Canada released its 2015/2016 enrolment data from the Post-Secondary Student Information System.  I didn’t quite have time to get to it before the break, but on New Year’s Day I decided to take a little stroll through the data.  Here’s what I found:. The first obvious thing to note is that growth in student numbers is a thing of the past.  For the second straight year, total enrolment in Canadian post-secondary is down slightly, which is the

Read More »
January 9, 2018 3 Comments

Replacing Permanent Faculty

Last week, I wrote a piece about how the professoriate is aging and how these aging professors are taking up an increasing fraction of university budgets.  My back of the envelope calculation suggested that for the extra $1.15 billion we are spending on this group compared to 15 years ago, we might be able to hire as many as 10,000 new, younger profs and thus help renew the professoriate. (To be clear this would not mean 10,000 extra professors, it would mean a little

Read More »
December 11, 2017 5 Comments

2016 Census Data on Education

Yesterday, Statistics Canada did the last of its big data dumps on the 2016 census and it covered education.  As usual, the HESA Towers team swung into action to get you the highlights (no, really, today was a big team effort, Jonathan W. and Robert B. did extra duty to get you this post today). Now, census data isn’t usually something that drives big headlines. You usually have plenty of notice about things like “people getting more educated than they

Read More »
November 30, 2017 No Comments

The Economics of Rankings

One of the greatest misapprehensions about rankings – and there are a lot, believe me – is that rankers are “just doing it for the money”.  For the most part, this is wrong.  It’s really hard to make money at rankings. To start with, at a rough guess, only about half of all rankings are done for commercial reasons.  Many get carried out by academic institutions or institutions affiliated thereto, and they have no intention whatsoever of making money.  Maybe the most

Read More »
November 28, 2017 No Comments

Fun with Canadian Scientific Publications Data

You may recall that in last Friday’s blog I was looking at scientific output of world-class universities.  I could do that thanks to quite an excellent database available from Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies, developers of the excellent multi-dimensional Leiden Rankings, which do a strong job of comparing university research output and impact. I have covered this output and impact a couple of times before back here and here.   This same data can be used to compare Canadian institutions – or at least the

Read More »
November 15, 2017 No 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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...