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Category: Data

Field of Study (oh the humanities!)

This is part II of a blog on new enrolment data. I’ll be focussing on the universities data today because the change there is more dynamic.  (I know, I know, college peeps: I don’t pay enough attention to you.  I’ll try to make this up to you next week). So let’s look at the division of undergraduate enrolment for a second.  Figure 1 shows the split between fields of science.  The Big Six are Social Science & Law (20%), Business/Commerce/Administration

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January 10, 2018 5 Comments

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

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January 9, 2018 2 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

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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

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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

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November 28, 2017 No Comments

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