Category: Data

Why our Science Minister is Going to be Disappointed in Statscan

Last week Statscan sent me a consultation form asking my opinions about their ideas on how to change UCASS (the University and College Academic Staff Survey, which like most Statscan products containing the word “college” does not actually include the institutions most of us call “colleges” i.e. community colleges).  I’ve already said something about this effort back here to the effect that focussing so much effort on data collection re: part-time staff is a waste of time, but the consultation guide makes

Read More »

Notes on the Finances of China’s Top Universities

One of my distractions over the past summer has been to learn more about Chinese universities.  And, fortunately, this is becoming a lot easier as Chinese universities are starting to put more of their data online.  Today, I just want to take you through a bit of a tour of China’s top universities (roughly the equivalent of the US Ivy League), which are known as the “C9”, most of which now put their financial data online. So let’s start just

Read More »

Some Curious Data From OECD Education at a Glance 2017

The OECD put out its annual Education at a Glance  publication yesterday.  No huge surprises except for the fact that they appear to have killed one of the most-used tables in the whole book (A.1.2, which compared tertiary attainment rates for 25-34 year olds by type of tertiary program – i.e. college v. university) which is an enormous bummer.  The finance data says what it pretty much always says: Canada is the #2 spender overall on higher education at 2.6% of GDP

Read More »

The Growing Importance of Fee Income

I made a little remark last week to the effect that on present trends, student fees would pass provincial funding as a source of revenue for universities by 2020-2021 and combined fed-prov government funding by 2025.  Based on my twitter feed, that seems to have got people quite excited.  But I should have been a little clearer about what I was saying. First of all, by “on present trends”, I literally meant do the simple/stupid thing and take the annual change from

Read More »

Data on Sexual Harassment & Sexual Assault in Higher Ed-an Australian Experiment

Earlier this year, I raged a bit at a project that the Ontario government had launched: namely, an attempt to survey every single student in Ontario about sexual assault in a way that – it seemed to me – likely to be (mis)used for constructing a league table on which institutions had the highest rates of sexual assault.  While getting more information about sexual assault seemed like a good idea, the possibility of a league table – based as it would be

Read More »